Sixteen:Nine

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Digichief has been helping digital signage and DOOH network operators feed the so-called content beast for a bunch of years. While the Kentucky-based company started up in 2007, its roots go back another decade to a tech start-up that did similar graphics-driven content work for broadcast TV. I've known co-founder Gene Hamm forever, but this podcast was the first time we had a detailed chat about what Digichief does and offers. We get into a bunch of things, including what's widely used and what seems like perfect contextual content, but hasn't caught on. We talk in detail, as well, about more customized content, and about a new service called Mercury that Digichief spent more than a year developing and recently rolled out. If you hear thumping sounds in the background on my end, that's the roofers. It wasn't until the morning we recorded this that I remembered about the racket they'd be making. Big job. Big bill. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Gene Hamm, thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know much about Digichief, could you gimme the elevator pitch on what you guys do?  Gene Hamm: Absolutely. Thanks Dave. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Am I the first one to say that?  Probably not, among the first.  Gene Hamm: My kids always say I've got a lot of dad jokes, so I oh, no, I won't bore with that. But thanks for having me today. I'm Gene Hamm, one of the founders of Digichief.  In a nutshell we're a content solutions provider. Basically, a one-source solution for all things content. We work in a number of capacities. We have a white labeled solution for data feeds for those clients who want to control the designs themselves. Or we can provide an integrated solution with HTML5, our widgets for clients that don't want to do the heavy lifting on the design. We already have it baked into our APIs, and so we've built up a library of content over the years. All the staples, weather news, sports info, that sort of thing. We also have some short-form, video series, and some other products that we work as distribution partners, with digital art, things like that. But in a nutshell, we aggregate, we curate, and we create content for you, and we provide it in a consistent manner. We take care of the licensing, and we keep up with the inevitable changes in the source, data feeds, and put it out in a highly scalable, cloud infrastructure. So I would say in the early days or earlier days of digital signage, a lot of companies, I shouldn't say a lot because there weren't many, and there still aren't that many, but the companies that were doing the sort of work that you do, I would describe as aggregators that they were collecting and harmonizing data feeds from news gathering organizations, government organizations like National Weather Service and so on, and getting in a format that's structured, reliable and all those sorts of things so that CMS companies or end users could tap into your feeds and have something that's reliable, organized, and curated to some degree. Is that a fair way of describing things?  Gene Hamm: That is a fair assessment, and I think it's evolved over time. I think early on, it was basically, just kind of an aggregation model. We actually started the company, it's an offshoot of another company we'd started back in the 90s where we worked in the broadcast television space, where we were doing lower third tickers, turnkey systems.  So kinda like Chiron?  Gene Hamm: Yeah, we were third-party developers for Chiron. So we worked a lot with Chiron early on, but a lot of the stuff you saw on the lower thirds and newscasts around the country was our stuff.  The dreaded tickers.  Gene Hamm: The dreaded tickers that kind of blew up in the 90s, yeah. We did news headlines, we were doing integrations with AP Weather. We actually ended up doing elections, school closings, and internet chat. We were all over the board on that.  So that's how we got our feet wet on integrating and aggregating content. In the mid 2000s, we saw the digital signage kind of take off, and we said, look, we've already got these connections with these sources, so why don't we just license these and license this vertical? So that's kind of how it started, but it's evolved over time. We certainly still do that and provide those in a consistent format, but then it's also moved into kind of bespoke projects where people will say, we've got this data, we've got, we want this, maybe we have to go out and do research on specific topics for “Cold weather starting tips for Automotive Dealerships”, things like that. So there's really a research arm to it that we can go out and create stuff for custom projects.  So if you had to give a percentage of from a third party versus what you guys are developing internally, what roughly would that be?  Gene Hamm: I would say about 60 to 70% of it is aggregating. All the staples, traffic, transit, flight data, news headlines, sports scores, the stuff that people want to display most often. So yeah, I would say roughly 60 to 70% of it, and then the other stuff is, a lot of stuff on the infotainment route is data-based that we've created over time and this could be for like “This day in history” trivia, fun facts, jokes, clean jokes of the day, holidays, whimsical, eye-catching things to get eyeballs up on the screen.  The challenge I've always seen with using third-party sources for things like tickers and full-screen presentations, whether it's from the AP, Canadian Press, or Reuters, is that they typically don't write headlines for digital signage or digital at home or anything else, and they don't even really do it in a lot of cases online. So what you end up with are headlines that don't really say anything. It'll say, “This week's top news is this…” and that'll show up on screens. I see it on broadcast still, and I'm going, why are you even using this? Why don't you curate stuff that you know has fully formed thoughts and says in a headline what you need to know versus kind of a teaser?  Have you guys struggled with that, or has it gotten better?  Gene Hamm: We've absolutely run into that. You're speaking to the choir here. We've knocked our head against the wall so many times, and I just think that for these news organizations, digital signage is an afterthought. Believe me, over the last 20 years, we've seen so many stories come out that we just scratch our heads, and I've had conversations with the editors to try to plead my case, and it just goes on deaf ears.  So basically what we have to do with our news, we have two formats. We have one that's filtered, and we've got lookups and intelligence written in where if something comes out misformed or certain key phrases, we just kick them out. And then we have basically a curated version where we actually go in and manually approve and post. We look at the image, we look at the images is another problem with it, but we look at the story, and we say, this doesn't make sense, or maybe we change a few words around to make it flow better and fit into a kind of concise title and description. So yeah, it's been a big problem and honestly it hasn't gotten any better in my viewpoint. Does AI present an opportunity to clean things up? Because I will take the odd story that I write and dump it into Claude and just say, “Give me 10 suggested headlines” and it'll knock out ten headline headlines in 15 seconds, and I'll look at it and go, oh, that one's pretty good and I'll take that one and maybe massage it a little bit. But it does a pretty good job with that sort of thing.  Gene Hamm: It absolutely will be a tool that we can utilize, and we're certainly looking into it right now to try to inject on our backend tools that you can request a specific, character-limited title that makes sense. One of the nuances to AI, which I know you're aware of, is that it's all in the phrasing of how you ask the question for the format that you wanted back in.  Prompt engineering.  Gene Hamm: Yeah. It's an art in itself, and what we see is that we think that AI can help this curation service to look at the headlines that we're getting and spit them out in more of a usable, readable, concise form.  But it's not gonna be autonomous anytime soon.  Gene Hamm: We'll see.  Yeah, not reliably autonomous, it's still gonna give you some weird headlines and all that, but then again, you could hire somebody and they'll give you weird headlines.  Gene Hamm: That's true. That's absolutely true. We try to say that our Soft News, which is our curated version, and we try to bill it as G-rated content that's not going to tick somebody off, but that's next to impossible these days because whatever you think is G-rated and is not going to satisfy everyone. We try to stay away from the political end of it, but there's always gonna be somebody that's offended. Yeah. I've talked to a few people who just said, you know what, we don't even do politics on our feeds anymore, or what we show on our screens, because somebody's gonna be irritated, somebody's gonna complain, and it's just not worth it.  Gene Hamm: Oh, the stories I can tell. It's funny. We have a custom bad word filter for stuff that we don't want to come across in the AP and so we've built that over time, and I could never let that see the light of day that the things that we've seen come across the wire that we now omit. Even the images as well. There are a lot of times we'll get images that don't really explain the story, it doesn't make sense, maybe they aren't centered on the right focal point of the image, and we think maybe AI could definitely benefit, maybe being able to zone in on what the main cue is of the image that we get with the AP stories or any of the news images.  Have the demands and the uses, usage trends evolved through the years, like when I got into digital, more than 25 years ago now, there weren't really even smartphones, and the internet was still fairly new-ish, and you could have public screens in elevators or walkways or shopping malls or whatever that were running news and weather on there, and those would be a primary source for that information, you fast forward to now, and you can't get away from news, you can't get away from weather data, that sort of thing.  I've always wondered, do those things need to be on screens anymore?  Gene Hamm: That's definitely a good debatable topic. There are so many of these black screens in our hands that fight for attention. We work in the automotive space in dealer showrooms and you walk into the showroom there and people are in the waiting area, and they've got screens up with content on it, news headlines, weather, things like that, and everybody is looking at their phone. So you're always thinking how do we compete with getting eyeballs up on the screen to get the messaging and whatnot for the client, as opposed to the ubiquitous news headlines and things like that. So yeah, it's something that our clients definitely have to deal with. Is that something you coach to, to tell both your resellers and your end users, that it's important to really think through what you're using in terms of content feeds or your content mix so that it's hyper relevant and contextual to where you are versus just “We need stuff to run on this lower third” or “We need stuff to run in between our dealer promotional messages” or whatever it may be, whatever the venue is. Gene Hamm: Absolutely. As you said, it's all in the content mix. If you're trying to get eyeballs up there on the screen, you gotta have relevant hyper-local content, whether that be local traffic maps or local sports scores or things like that for the market.  But yeah, the dwell time and how long the content is on the screen, you want to get the eyeballs up there and then move on to what your marketing message is. So it's definitely a delicate balance between, you can't just inundate someone with all the news, all weather. You definitely have to make it in short, concise forms because people's attention spans go elsewhere. They go back to their phone or something else.  A few months ago, you announced a partnership with a company called Stream, and I've done a podcast with those folks and laid out what they do and all that.  How do you work with them, and could you kinda run down what they do and how that's resonating with your user base? Gene Hamm: Yeah, so we met Anthony Nerantzis at one of the trade shows, and he came by and explained his interest. He's kind of a broadcaster, newsroom journalist. So basically, what it is they do is a presenter-led, concise, short-form video of bespoke custom news, right? And it can be catered to the industry.  So if it's medical, financial, or automotive, or what have you. They can go back, write the scripts, and of course, Anthony can describe this company better than I can, so hopefully he's not gonna be mad at me for giving this kind of dissertation. But yeah, I just thought it brought to the table something that we could really customize for our clients, and it's very professional, the workflow is great, you can provide some of the background, what you know the company's looking to do, what type of information they're trying to get across, their team can go back and write a script that's engaging and they can automate the product to put it out on whatever the interval you need, whether it be weekly or monthly.  Originally, when they came out, it was a closed caption type thing with lower third supers on the bottom of the screen and I had mentioned to them, “Hey, there are too many graphics on the screen. Maybe, you might wanna streamline that a little bit.” They did that because they're very good about taking feedback, and now they've moved in. It was more of a no-volume type environment product, and now they've, they're able to do audio voiceover as well from the on-air talent actually speaking and you can actually hear it.  Now they're getting into kind of the marketing communication end of it where, let's say it's a pharmaceutical company or something that wants to talk about things that like the president or the CEO wants to talk about certain things to their employees that they have going on, his team's able to go out and produce that and deliver that information and they can get eyeballs up on the screen, educate and inform the client. It's been very well received and we're also looking to work with them on some of our feeds, whether it's health-related type content, maybe we can work in some of the real, day-to-day, hyper-local information on the tail end of the video segment. Say if it's a medical facility and they're talking about medical health tips, things like that, maybe it comes in and we can integrate with one of our APIs and follow the levels of the flu levels there are for the specific area, so we can really hyper-localize it.  So in a lot of respects, it's a variation on the sort of work that you've been doing, particularly on the custom side of it. But instead of it just being text and visuals, they can do a full video with on-air talent and they do that by green screening, on-air hosts, and then mashing that up with AI so that it's a human talking to you and doing a custom presentation as opposed to an anime avatar look that I think looks ghastly in most cases? Gene Hamm: Absolutely. I think going to the presenter-led approach is advantageous and some of the early ones, like you said, that we've seen are just creepy. But I think what they're doing with their technology is amazing. I think it looks spot on.  Yeah, I've looked at it a couple of times for extended periods, just paying attention to see if it's glitchy at all, and it's very smooth, and if you didn't know, you'd be hard pressed to know, this is AI-generated, but it's absolutely human. But the movements and lips and all that stuff are being massaged through AI.  Gene Hamm: Yeah, and the neat thing about it, too, is just it's so scalable and they can automate it, and they can really like its bespoke content, so they can create the script, have it produce it in very short order. So more recently, you've announced something else called Mercury. Can you walk through what that is?  Gene Hamm: Mercury was created basically to give our users a more robust way to onboard our HTML content. We were getting requests for more of a web portal that gives more granular design choices such as colors, backgrounds, logos, the transitions. They can go in and micromanage the news they wanna see, or the sports they want to see, the duration that it's on the screen, and then, they can compile that into a playlist and then output it to a URL and that URL can be scheduled. It's quite a long time coming. We certainly had HTML55 widgets before, but this just gives people a little bit more granular decisions and a web portal, and then we also thought it was a good way to showcase our widget library. We built up these designs over time. Many of the products that we have, there's multiple designs, and so for, we think it might be a growth area for new prospects, that it lowers the barrier of entry to go out and actually, sign up for a free trial, take a look at, it's an all you can eat type model where we've got all the staples, the news, the weather, the sports, the stocks, the infotainment and we're adding new designs and widgets all the time. I think it's intuitive where we spent well over a year designing the system, and I think it really gives people a way to sample our products and see how it works with their systems.  Could you give an example of how a typical client would use it and what they do? Gene Hamm: Yeah, so they sign up for the product. It's a subscription service, with volume discounts that they can go in, and we've got a kind of smorgasbord of content, a widget library and it's all categorized by, like I said, news, weather, things like that, and they can pick and choose what content they wanna build into a playlist? Now that could be just a single piece of content, whether, say, weather, and they've got a bunch of different designs, whether they wanna do a 5K five-day forecast, if they wanna do a full-screen weather map, they can choose their locations, and then they can output it as a URL that URL can be a plugged into a playlist and that pluglist can have their content or they can massage their own local content, through their own platform, so it just gives them the ability to do this kind of infotainment type stuff in between their other messaging.  But yeah, they can build a playlist with a single asset, or they can build a playlist with 30 and build a longer duration, say, a 20-minute loop if they want. So yeah, that's the typical workflow.  So more normally or in the past, if I were a corporate entity and I had a corporate campus in three cities in South Carolina. If I were buying that from a typical subscription content service or weather provider, it's going to have a certain look and color schemes, everything else, and you can't really deviate from that, versus with Mercury, you can choose your fonts, choose your background, colors, everything else, and tweak it so it fits the way you want, maybe has the company's corporate colors and or just fits in with the overall look of the network.  Is that a clear way of saying this? Gene Hamm: Yeah. To make it very granular, the layout of, let's say, a five-day forecast, the data itself is set on the screen, but all the other elements around it like if they wanted to upload their own. company logo, if they wanna match their corporate colors, they can choose certain fonts that may match what you know they're using. So yeah, they can make different transitions to it, so they can really make granular choices with it to fall in line with what they're looking for, but be on the same thing across the same board. We have stocks, if they wanna put their own company stock up there, they can do that. If they wanna do infotainment like trivia or whatnot, we have a number of different trivia categories that they can choose. So yeah, they can really hyper-localize.  Do you put guardrails in terms of design choices that can be made? Like thinking particularly of font choices and Lord knows we've all seen online, particularly, and less so on digital signage, here somebody decides I'm going to use this font, and it's just the wrong choice.  Gene Hamm: We have chosen a list of fonts that we have in a dropdown box that they can choose from. As you can imagine, this was our initial decision when we debuted this release system a few months ago, and our thought is that we wanna give them these options to an extent, right? So we have several fonts that we think we deem look good, and we certainly can add additional fonts as we go. But yes, I agree there's some god awful fonts up there that we don't think would at the end of the day look great on particular design.  Is this the way to deal with the demand that can scale up so that if you were just doing this through managed services, where you would have companies come to you and say, “Hey, we would like a live custom feed that presents ou  weather and other information in these fonts, this background and everything else.” That's hard to do and hard to charge because if it's a one-off, you gotta charge a lot more for it, versus a service where you log in and you do it yourself, by and large, that makes it possible to do more.  Gene Hamm: Yeah, I think so. I think with the pricing model, how we have it, they can use everything. It's all you can eat, in terms of all these different designs and content categories that they can go in and it's not gonna cost them anymore if they put the news or the weather up there. I think the value proposition to Mercury is that we're doing the heavy lifting on the backend, and that these local networks don't have to go out and find different sources, and like you mentioned, the National Weather Service.  Early on, we were integrating with the National Weather Service and that got to be just an overwhelming task because of stages and formats, and changes in the designs and things like that. It just made more sense for us to go out and get an aggregated list. Actually, we have a couple of different aggregated services. So, like a lot of our staples, we have a primary source and a backup source. So if one goes inevitably, these sources have issues, and if one goes down. It really streamlines the whole process.  Has the whole business of getting data from different sources improved? Have they started to, or maybe not started, but long since understood that you can't keep changing the structure. You've gotta stick to something.  Gene Hamm: Yes and no. With sports specifically, they're good about giving us a heads up when things are gonna change. In the olden days, we would find out about it after it happened. So I think a lot of the source APIs that we have do a good job of giving us kind of a change. But there's repercussions. If they do a full change of their structure, we have to integrate that, and if it has any changes to how we do content, we have to let our clients know, and we have to make sure the widgets are changed. We have to make sure they know that the structure's changed.  During the pandemic, we really moved our cloud infrastructure from one cloud service to another. We added a lot of data points to our structure, and so that was really an uphill battle in terms of having to communicate to our current client base that had already done the design work and had already integrated with our APIs to let them know that's coming. So we don't take these things lightly and we've communicated to our sources over time about the repercussions to this. You can't just pull the trigger and give us a two-week notice.  What about social media? If I go back 10-15 years, there were a lot of subscription content providers and CMS companies developing widgets so that you could display Twitter (now X) or Facebook post or whatever maybe on screens and I think over time people realize, oh boy, that's a dangerous thing to do unless you've got somebody sitting right on top of it all the time.  Gene Hamm: It's absolutely the case. In fact, we were one of the ones early on that were doing native integrations with the APIs from Twitter and Facebook and whatnot, and it got to be a full-time job for our developers, changing not only the licensing, but the structure, and we finally threw in the towel on it and outsourced it to a company where that's all they do, and so we work with this particular company, and they take care of it. They've got a team of developers that don't do anything else, and they keep up on all the backend changes, the licensing, and so we're able to not only provide Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or X, LinkedIn, all this as a concise data feed with different data points and assets, and then we also have an HTML version that integrates with it.  So yeah, we've definitely gone the route of outsourcing that to someone who could keep up with it. Is there a most popular resource and one that you thought would have traction and that just never worked out, and you've since dropped or rarely see sold? Gene Hamm: About a year ago, we started with a health API, so seasonal and patient level data, and by seasonal, we mean pollen which is a big one and we have multiple sources for that. But, RSV levels, COVID-19 numbers, cold and cough, and flu. And then we can even get granular with patients. We can go and say a zip code in the United States, and say, what are the ten highest levels of obesity? And they can customize a message or an ad campaign towards that. Those particular zip codes we thought would take off at least the patient-level stuff and it was just really slow out of the gate. We've had a lot of interest and we've made a lot of presentations, but I think there are a lot of these companies that are still trying to figure out how they might use it. Flight data is one that we work with, and we have some clients using it.  There are certain sources that are very expensive to keep up with. That's something that we thought would be selling more than it does. A lot of times, the people that you know that put the flight data up are probably going directly to the source as opposed to going through somebody like us.  Is there one that everybody uses, or almost everybody?  Gene Hamm: Everybody uses weather, of course, that's the big one. Everybody uses sports scores, and everybody uses news. That's news, weather, sports are the big dogs.  Just a couple of final questions. Where are you guys based, and how big is your company? I'm thinking you don't have that big of a headcount because you don't need to, because you're using external resources. Gene Hamm: Yeah, so we're based in Lexington, Kentucky. We also have partners spread across the world. But I got a partner in California. There are a few of us here, and then we've got a couple in Ukraine. So we've been working with a couple of developers who are now employees in Ukraine, well before the war. So it's been interesting seeing that side of it from an employee.  It gives you a perspective on a drone flying over, and bombings and things like that. So there are five of us. We run a small operation, but like you said, we don't really need an extensive team. We certainly have worked with or contracted out some design work in terms of the graphical design. We've worked with the same designers for well over a decade. All right, so thank you. If people wanna find out more, it's just Digichief.com, right?  Gene Hamm: Yeah, Digichief.com, and then if someone wants to sample Mercury for a free trial, there's a Mercury link on there that they can go and sign up for, and give it a whirl.  Gene, thank you. Gene Hamm: Thank you, Dave. I appreciate your time.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT If you go to big outdoor sports events, concerts in parks or even political rallies, there's a reasonable chance that what's happening is going to be relayed on a portable LED display that was wheeled into place by   trailer. My local footy team uses one and it is old and looks terrible. But that's not the norm, and certainly not for a Des Moines, Iowa company that is very specifically in the business of making and selling great-looking and bulletproof on-the-go LED trailers. Insane Impact has been at it for eight years and now has almost 500 units operating, mostly but not only in the United States. The flagship product is 17 feet wide by 10 feet tall, using 4mm LED and pushing as much as 7,500 nits. It's been designed to roll into place and be up and running in 10 minutes or less - even if a doofus like me was told to get it lit up. I had a really good chat with Tod Puetz, who started the company after first being a user, when he was in the golf equipment business. In this podcast, we get into a lot of things - including how he had the foresight to get ahead of the tariffs turmoil and pre-ordered enough electronics and hardware to hopefully ride out these uncertain months. We also talk about use-cases and probably the most curious application to date - drive-in funerals when COVID was raging. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Tod, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Insane Impact does, where you're based, those kinds of nuts and bolts questions?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, appreciate it Dave. Insane Impact, primarily focused on LED as a business, but we are an audio video integration company based out of Des Moines, Iowa.  Des Moines. So you're in flyover country? Tod Puetz: Absolutely.  It's actually very handy there because you're like two hours away from the East Coast and two hours away from the West coast, right?  Tod Puetz: It really is. Just in proximity here in the central part of the US, where our corporate office and warehouse location is about 65 seconds from the airport Des Moines International, so very easy to get in. All the major interstate throwaways between I-29 North and South and I-35 North and South, and then I-80 West. We're pretty much within minutes of getting anywhere we need to go east, west, north, or south.  Nice. How long has the company been around?  Tod Puetz: We started up in 2015, flipped the switch basically late December, 2015 and have been going rock and roll. So we're coming up on our 10 year anniversary here in December.  You are a founder?  Tod Puetz: I am, yeah. Founder and CEO.  So what compelled you to do this? What did you see in the marketplace that said, okay, this is what I should do?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, really the CliffNotes version, my former life was in the golf business. I was a manufacturer sales rep for TaylorMade Golf, and I was introduced to a gentleman here locally in Des Moines that had an older video truck and basically saw an opportunity to utilize that as a sales tool to help me sell more golf clubs.  So we took this video truck out on the driving range here locally in Des Moines, hooked it up to the launch monitor and, gosh, that was almost 18 years ago. Back then it was a big deal. Not a lot of people in your run of the mill average daily golfer really ever had an op opportunity to do that. They'd seen it on tour. But we brought the bigs out to the little team here in some of these country clubs, and again, larger than life. They were able to see their stats up on the screen and really fell in love with the technology back then, and were able to utilize that for a number of years after that initial introduction. What was it back then? What was the technology back then, early LED?  Tod Puetz: It was an SMD, It was an early 8x8 millimeter SMD back then. I refer to it as antiquated, but back then, it was pretty fresh and new. But yeah, just the idea of being able to drive this thing up to the driving range, the wings folded open on this thing and, within minutes we're plug and play and just really, fell in love with that concept. ,  Yeah. So did you buy the business from him or just get something going on your own? Tod Puetz: Did not. We utilized them. It was a kind of a one man show there. It was more of a hobby for individuals, and they used it for four or five years. But they weren't interested in scaling this thing. As my career with TaylorMade progressed more and more, I ended up working with other companies, just trying to understand the LED business. So I branched out and helped a few other smaller LED niche companies to try to generate some business in the sports space. We just had a lot of relationships with the golf business and yeah, really just took the concept and I knew there was a different mouse trap here with that type of opportunity to scale it, that's where we started things in late 2015. So the idea is just at its bare essentials, and I think most people understand this anyways, but just in case, is you've got a foldable all in one LED display that's on a trailer and your customers are rolling it out to different locations, whether they're entertainment events, sports events or something else, and finding power, plugging it in, open it, and driving a signal to it, and you've got a big display where it needs to be for three days or three weeks or whatever it is, right?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, absolutely. By no means, does Insane Impact claim to be the inventor of mobile LED. Obviously, that has been one man for a very long time. Our business, Insane Impact, started up on the rental side. We designed, fabricated and engineered a handful of units, just to service what we thought was gonna be a Midwest boutique rental business and very quickly became a national presence. And what we found was that the same people were renting products two, three and four times a year, and really, our thought process was, why don't we just own one of these things, and we can use it 365 days a year, if we want? And again, there were already customers out there, there were common trucks that were selling trailers, but it wasn't popular and we really started working back in 2016 to develop a plan where if you own the product, we can certainly start to feed your business as well, you can be part of our rental network and that's really what kind of, put the fuel on the fire. Each year, more and more units in the field, more and more customers from parks and municipalities, armed forces, college, university, all of the usual suspects out there that use these things on a regular basis, really became the traction for rapid growth in this endeavor.  So your company, it's an interesting kind of mashup of different competencies, so to speak, in that if you are manufacturing rolling stock with lots of heavy-duty metals and wheels and everything else, that's one thing. And then at the polar opposite, you've got fairly sensitive electronics. So you're doing both sides of that, right?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, absolutely. We take a fully engineered and manufactured trailer. These trailers weigh anywhere from 3,500 pounds on our smallest unit up to 18,000 pounds on a triple axle gooseneck. And they've got real high end LEDs permanently. We've approached it a little bit differently. We're putting a fixed product on it. So something that's used to and withstands the elements pretty much anywhere, including the road, and then obviously everything else on the unit is fully protected from shock, from absorption of weather. Everything's IP67 through the components side of things, and IP65 on the trailer, fully powder coated system.  So we've really built, tried, and tested a product that's gonna last and withstand the elements going up and down the road at 75 miles an hour in any extreme environment.  I'm guessing that you, in your early years, had some lessons, whether they were hard ones or whatever.  Tod Puetz: Yeah, absolutely. It wouldn't be any fun if we didn't. Our first major lesson that we learned, Dave and I think this is really what sets us apart is that we did the hang and bang modular cabinets on our product for the first, probably two and a half years and we learned the lesson real quick that those just aren't designed to withstand the long-lasting road and weather, wear and tear. At the time, that's what everybody was using it and that's kind of where we were at. It took a lot of headaches, blood and sweat, for those first two years to figure out what product really made sense. For the last four and a half years, we've really been rock and rolling on a specific product, chassis, and stuff that just really outperformed, in a big way. So that was a very painful lesson because you're a year into this thing, and you've got issues, and those are hard to come by as a startup, but we were able to weather the storm and find what really worked for us and I think that really separate us from most right now is we just, we're putting some of the best products out there on the market on these trailers. And you not only have to make it bulletproof, but I suspect you have to do it down like crazy, because this can not be something that takes 45 minutes and has a checklist, like launching a rocket or something. It's gotta roll into place and find power and open the hinges, lock them down, and get a signal in, right? Tod Puetz: Yeah, you nailed it. I think one of the things as we built this thing out, Dave, is that the single most important part was customer focus and customer friendly, and I will tell you that you yourself, or even my 18-year-old daughter, can get this thing up and running in less than 10 minutes. We pride ourselves on delivering a turnkey functional unit to our flagship product, which is our Max 1710. You can pull in, and it'll take you longer to unhook it than it will to turn it on and set it up in some respects. We offer a generator-powered option or a battery-powered option. We've got a fully self-sustained, lithium-ion pack that is performing at an incredible level right now, which we're really excited about.  So we worked with a major organization probably about 18 months ago, in the Armed Forces space, and we worked with them to design a fully self-sustainable battery pack solution and were really excited about that. We can talk about that a little bit more here, but at the end of the day, our electronics cabinet is an IP67 rated rack that basically opens it up, and as you know, with everything, we run Nova Star. So everything is just a straight playback video. So just hit the breakers, hit the power switch, and you're off and running. So we really did wanna make this thing turnkey. They come fully self-sustained with audio as well. We wanted to make sure that anybody and everybody could operate this thing very quickly.  Is there a media playout box in there, or do you use an external feed and then just plug it into an HDMI or whatever it may be? Tod Puetz: Plenty of different options. Most often our customers, like your Park and Rec municipality, the people that are using this thing to play movies and stuff, they're just streaming it off the laptop. But we got an IO box that they can drop in, SDI, fiber, anything else if you're running or whatever it might be. But yeah, anybody can bring us any signal within, within a minute, and we're up and running. So really trying to get in that turnkey facet of this thing to make sure that we're in a good spot.  Okay, so you're sourcing the trailer from a third-party manufacturer as opposed to bending metal and doing all that yourself and you're sourcing the electronics, and you're basically doing final assembly, right?  Tod Puetz: Correct. Yep.  Doing it the other way would be very complicated.  Tod Petz: We did that when we first started this little venture, we hired engineers, we bought the welders, we were buying cut parts and building them ourselves, and we realized very quickly that in a 4,000 square foot facility that when this thing takes up, it'd be impossible to keep up. So we were very fortunate to find a local vendor that was in the trailer business already but they took a liking to what we were doing, and it really has just been a wonderful partnership and relationship with them. They build a fantastic product, best-in-class warranty around it, and it's really the fit and the finish from premium laser cut, premium powder coat finishes, all the details that are there, and certainly, we work with some of the best engineers out there in the marketplace to create the best product so really exciting to have that partnership. On the LED side and the electronics side, we're taking the trailer and we're taking the electronics and we're putting the fit and finish on it and making it function and delivering a finished product.  I assume you have some sort of a contract manufacturer or a finished goods supplier in, whether it's China, Taiwan, or somewhere else you're sourcing from. Tod Puetz: On the electronic side, yeah, we do. So we actually just made an announcement here yesterday. We are partnered with DVS (Dynamic Visual Solutions). We've been working with them for almost six years now.  Obviously, Chinese based, but we got in touch with the owner and the CEO of the US business almost six years ago and kind of started to understand what it meant for us and what it meant for them to be a partner and really have our hands on the technology, help them with some of the design elements that we needed within the product to make sure that it was gonna pass the buck and make sure that it lasted and, almost six years later. But, yeah, we just had a nice press release announcing the partnership. We got a huge opportunity with them with the craziness that's going on out there in the space. But great company, wonderful products, best-in-class warranties, and we've had the ability to shape what that product needs to be on our trailers.  I suspect that was a bit of a journey too, finding the right supplier because we've all heard the stories about different companies who make a lot of promises, but what shows up isn't what you thought you were getting. Tod Puetz: Yeah, it was. So we had gone through probably three to five different manufacturers, three to four at least prior to getting with DVS and it's very painful on that side of it because you are dealing with somebody over in China, and sleepless nights and figuring stuff out and a startup and all of the fun things that happen around that. When we were able to locate, DVS was based out of Florida. They really just took a liking to what we were doing and threw all the chips on the table and said, we've got a great modular rental business going, but we're really intrigued about this mobile solution. How can we help? And we really started to dig cautiously optimistic out of the gate because there are thousands of people out there trying to get the business in some respects.  Could we go to one of the major five or six? Yeah, we certainly could have, but we felt like there was a little bit more of an intimate approach to this. We were a newer company. We took our time getting into what we really wanted, and we felt like we had a little more leverage working with a decent-sized company. And with somebody who's got an office in Florida as opposed to Shenzhen or Beijing. Tod Puetz: Correct.  I don't want to get too deep into what's going on right now, but how are you navigating the tariff situation right now?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, that's the million dollar question and in some cases, multi millions. When I started this company, Dave, I had two stances that I wanted to live by. One, I was gonna over-index on our employees and make sure that we had the right people in the right seats, and take very good care of them. The other one that came later on, probably after we had established and it was I'm never gonna run out of products. I just know that if we have products, we'll sell them.  So after those first three, four years, we put ourselves in a position where we've rubber stamped our products, we know who we're selling to, we know what our core markets are, and we've got the right people in the right seats and I just knew that if I would run out of product, then I just make sure that we are collectively chasing the business. That's a really hard thing to do. But fortunately, we've got the right vendors to do this with.  So back in November, after the current administration was elected or they won the nomination, knowing that this discussion of tariffs was on the horizon, we took a very calculated and risky approach, but we went out and bought a slew of equipment. So we bought basically upwards of almost a year of supply in LEDs out front. We went to our trailer manufacturer. They bought a year's worth of supply of our top three SKUs and hedged the bet with us. So we're in a little different position than most, again, there are a lot of people out there who probably did the same thing. I'm not the only one out there who took that risk, but we did take the risk, and it's certainly paying off. That kind of gets you an idea of where we're at and how we've run our business. We just don't wanna run out of products. So fast forward to today in reality, I think there's a blinking that's happening, there's a stance, and this isn't a political statement by any means. This is just our gut feeling on this is, I feel like it's gotta loosen up a little bit here. It can only go so hard and so fast. But we've been able to weather the tariff storm, internally at Insane, impacted by some of the stuff we did on the front end. We have not been significantly impacted by LEDs. If we're to place orders today on LEDs. Honestly, it's been fairly minimal in the impact. We're seeing some of the expensive shipping surcharges that are happening. But I think there's just buying power that's come with some of the things that we've done with our manufacturer to keep them rocking and rolling, that have helped us mitigate a little bit of this. But you're not like some of these companies where they're wringing their hands, okay, in order to get something out of a container in Long Beach, California, I need to write a check for an extra million dollars that I had not anticipated.  Tod Puetz: Yeah, we're not dealing with that. I think where this thing's really impacted, the hundreds of, I'm just gonna call them mom and pop manufacturers over there, whether they're manufacturers or just the days of them just shipping, 12x7s into the States by air is probably coming to an end or they're pricing themselves out of the market a little bit. Either that or they just don't care. But I think a lot of this is the consolidation in the short-term impact that we've seen in real life. The long-term impact, in my opinion, is gonna weed some of them out, and then obviously you've got all the Chinese entity companies, the larger players in the game that are having to come to market with distribution here in the US, where it impacts us the most. So they're adding additional layers of cost and it's really gonna open the door from what we're seeing, it's gonna open the door for us to other markets by virtue of that since we're already and established US distributor. When you first got in touch, I didn't know that much about you and thought, you're a rental company, but I was intrigued that, sure, you do rentals, but really, you're a manufacturer and you're selling to companies who are more regional rental companies. That's accurate, correct?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, it's interesting. So we've really got three business units, Dave. But we started off as a rental company with a primary focus on the mobile solution. We did have modular hanging bangs as well that we took care of some specific customers, but when we kinda uncovered the opportunity, evolved is a great word into the more offside of the business selling video trailers, that opened up a whole other segment of opportunity for us to then really start to take a look at the fixed install stuff.  Our three business units are really, primarily led by the mobile video solution on the trailers, and other new innovative products coming. Now, by the way, we do the marquees and the scoreboards and the highway signs, the airport conference room takeover stuff. We do all of that as well, and oh, by the way, customers that have video trailers, they become part of our cross-rental network. So this nucleus business unit feeds that we have, one feeds the other and that feeds another. It's really that we create a really cool situation here that allows us to have return business from our customers in all of those different facets. Because if you can't afford it, you can rent it. If you rent it too many times, then you can afford to buy it, and oh, by the way, we can replace your scoreboard or we can replace your, your, your classroom or your theater, modular wall, whatever it might be.  We do all three of them, and we do, we feel like we do them pretty well, and again, we're very lucky to have those three business units that fill the pipeline on a regular basis.  Is there a rule of thumb as to that point where, okay, we can rent this five times a year and that makes financial sense, but there's a certain break point where it makes more sense just to buy it? Tod Puetz: Yeah, that's a wonderful question because it really comes down to there's such a tremendous education process. Again, up until maybe, really when we started, at least here in the US, there was nobody else that was mass producing or really proactively selling to the end customer, and when we started doing that, we were very fortunate just to have some relationships where they actually saw the light. “Oh, this makes sense.”  Yeah, it's a high school or a college, and they're using it for their game day stuff. But what's been more fun for me in this company is to see just the evolution of the education that's had that's happened. Going to a city administrator and telling them, hey, it's not just the three movie nights a year, it's all of your chamber events. It's the community support events, it's the fundraiser stuff. So when they start to understand the use case of these items, these trailers, and that they can turn and burn and have these things up and running, whether it's just mass notification, you've got storms coming, or just any and all of those things.  Once they understand the full use case of applications that these products can offer, then the light comes on, and then it becomes a much easier conversation for them to take to the stakeholders and say, alright, we really need this. Here are all the reasons why. So our sales team is incredibly focused on the educational side of the business on how this can impact the community, campus, etc.  I realize you have a number of different sizes and everything else, but, for your primary selling unit, what would that cost?  And if I wanted to rent it for a weekend, if I'm in Ames, Iowa, what would that cost to rent it for a weekend?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, great question. So our flagship product is our Max 1710. So 17 wide, 10 foot tall, 3.9 millimeters on their turnkey generator operation, delivery, and tech. To rent that thing for a day, in this market, it does vary a little bit based on coast to coast. You get a three-day festival and you're spending $7,500 to 8,000 bucks for a screen that's operated that comes turnkey, that has power if needed. That's gonna turn the lights on and be reliable. So that's a pretty good snapshot of what we offer from a rate card on that specific product. If somebody wants to buy it, I'm gonna say turnkey trailer screen electronics, generator, audio. If you want the Mac Daddy package delivered to your doorstep, you're in that $150-160k range, which is gonna get you, 10-year parts, five-year labor on LED screen warranty, five-year parts, five-year labor on the trailer warranty, and then obviously an electronics warranty. So you're really protecting the investment there, Dave.  We're not the most expensive in the marketplace. We're definitely not the least. We feel like we're in a really good slot, and I think our adoption within the marketplace probably supports that. But that gives you a quick snapshot of where we're at from the pricing structure. So if you're a company that's on the rental side of it, you could see an ROI in a year if you're in a busy market.  Tod Puetz: Absolutely. Yeah. I think, 1710, and this doesn't factor in your cogs, your travel, your truck, your tech, etc. Sure. But if you get 20 to 25 really strong rental events within your market on a single day's use, you're right there certainly, being able to pay it back.  And it goes back to that education process. When we sell a customer a unit, we don't guarantee them any business, in terms of what we can bring to them from the cross-rental network. We're very forthright about that. But what does happen is if you're a proven, vetted, rental partner out there in the marketplace, you can bet, you're gonna get some help with monetizing this thing. That's the unique part about this business relationship with our customers on the trailer side is: we're gonna help you guys monetize the unit over time.  I have season tickets to the local Canadian Premier League soccer team that does very well here. They pull 6,500 people to games, but it's at a somewhat temporary stadium, and they have an LED display, it looks like maybe a 17x10 on a truck.  I severely doubt it's yours because it's a piece of crap. It's not very bright, it's not very crisp or anything, but it's something, so I gather that this can be all over the map in terms of what you rent. If you're an end user, you have to pay attention to the specs.  Tod Puetz: Absolutely. We prided ourselves on being the leader when it comes to what products are out there on mobile products, in and of itself. But it really comes down to the screen at the end of the day. I guess we will probably take it a step further. We do take a lot of pride in the physical trailer itself, the metal that this thing rides on, because that's as important to me as it's the LED.  But at the end of the day, having something that you can put up in direct sunlight and have the most quality, crisp image, is what we've over-indexed on that in a good way. So what we come to market with is a 7500 nit, 3.9 product, competitively in the marketplace. 3.9 from our core competitors are in that 4500-5500 nit and it just overpowers everything.  So again, if you're rolling up to the game for a little pre-game watch party, you're gonna get the best viewing experience possible, with some of the product. But we do pay a lot of attention to the spec, the physical components, the quality, and that's very close to our chest, so we don't take that for granted. So you're doing lots of sports and entertainment events, probably some corporate events. I'm curious, what's the most unusual one that you're aware of?  Tod Puetz: It was interesting. You look at Covid and the impact that it had on the industry, and all of these companies out there that have stages and rigging and modular and everything else, they took a little bit of a bath at the onset of Covid, and really, what allowed us to squeeze in and continue to, I would say, entertain, but take care of customers that had to continue to engage, whether it was employees or crowds or whatever.  So we did everything. But this leads up to your question, doing drive-in funerals was probably one of the most unique things that we've done. They couldn't get into the churches, so we were pulling up to large parking lots and they were streaming the funeral from inside the church out to the streets. It was really wild, but I bet we did anywhere from 50 to 60 funerals in late 2020 and in early 2021 until the restrictions relaxed a little bit. So we had funeral homes. We probably have three or four customers that actually own these, as a result of Covid, and they continue to use them for different settings in the church and funeral space. That would be the one that comes to mind, honestly, is that kind of the most bizarre one that you never really think about? Yeah.  How many units do you have out there, roughly?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, so we shipped the first unit in January of 2017 to a gasoline company in Texas. By the end of this month, the end of April, we delivered right around 495 units into the marketplace all around the US. We've got some army bases and navy bases over in Japan. We've got a handful of units over in Europe, a good chunk over in Hawaii, obviously I know that's US, but largely, 95 to 97% of what we've got is here in the lower 48. We do have a few up in your neck of the woods as well, but, yeah, we've been very to lead the charge there as it relates to the go to product in the marketplace. Super interesting. If people wanna know more, they just find you at insaneimpact.com?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, InsaneImpact.com. They can learn a little bit more about everything we do, but it's an exciting time for us. I know there's a little bit of uncertainty and doom and gloom, but we're just keeping our heads down. We've got customers that want the product. They may want it, but how do we get them to realize that they need the product to continue to advance their business, regardless of the sector, and I think if they get in touch with our folks, we're putting ourselves in a good spot to provide really good information and provide a great solid starting base for our conversation. I'm impressed with the advanced planning that you did. I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who were sitting around this week and saying, I didn't see that coming.  Tod Puetz: Head on a swivel constantly, there's no question.  Alright, Todd, thanks very much for taking the time.  Tod Puetz: Dave, I appreciate you. Take care now!

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Every so often I'll get a call or email from an industry friend asking me about a software company called Zynchro, because they were in the mix, or the incumbent, on some sort of deal that was in play. Yes, I'd say. I've heard of them. But that was about it. Well, that's changed, as I had a good chat recently with Jose Behar, one of the two brothers who founded the company some 30 years ago. Zynchro has very quietly built up a nice book of business, mostly in the United States, with SaaS software marketed on the basis of flexibility, rock-solid reliability and low annual costs. By its own admission, the Dallas-based company operates very quietly. But the installed base is north of 50,000 devices, many of them involving a couple of giant global brands. Like most whale clients, Zynchro can't quite say who those are ... but have a listen, and it becomes fairly obvious. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jose, thank you for joining me. I have heard about Zynchro, but we've never met, at least, I don't think so, and while I've heard about the company, I don't know a lot about it, and you're one of those companies that seems to be very active, quite successful, but kinda an old World War II submarine. You're running silent and deep.  Jose Behar: Yes, we were silent for a long time. Even when my brother and I started a company 30 years ago, we started doing multimedia and CGI animation, and one of our ways to do business was to keep networking, being a little bit silent on the media, but having a lot of reputation among client to client, mouth to mouth.  So if I bumped into you in an elevator, and I'm not in this business and asked, oh, what do you do? What does your company do? What would you tell them?  Jose Behar: Zynchro is a digital signage platform SaaS, software as a service. So, our clients can use Zynchro for different kinds of applications and in a lot of vertical markets. Zynchro is not only a content manager. Maybe a lot of our clients, or the people that hear about us, look at us as content managers, but we have different modules. We now have four modules, and we are developing two more for health monitoring for all the players in the network. Also, analytics, all kinds of different analytics for interactive and non-interactive presentations. Of course, the content management, and we also have the campaign module. The campaign module is the monetizing area.  One of our biggest clients is one the biggest retailers in the market. They are using this campaign module, and you can see different media and articles saying that they are making billions of dollars using their digital signage. and now all the stores and all their home office and some distribution centers are using our software to communicate and to control their digital signage.  So the campaign manager is basically enabling a retail media network? Jose Behar: That's right. The idea is creating a TV network where our clients can sell their advertising spaces, and they can have all the inventory and all the reports that they need in order to show their clients all the information.  There are a hell of a lot of companies out there that do what you do. You've been at it for a very long time, three decades. What is it about what you do that differentiates it from the scores of other companies who have a pretty similar offer. Everybody has their unique aspects to it, but what is it about yours? Jose Behar: We don't use other hardware or software APIs. For example, one of the players that we use is BrightSign, and we know all the insights of the player. We are able to be a standalone. We don't need their software to be useful.  Another thing is that we are the owners of the intellectual property, and we develop everything completely. So our clients are able to ask us for different kinds of customizations, all kinds of customizations we have done with all of our clients, and connect directly to their systems or allow different kinds of peripherals. For example, right now, we were selected by Sony Semiconductor to integrate their AI camera Aitrios into our software as almost a plug and play. We are now the only software that can manage that and use that camera in digital signage without any additional development.  So for BrightSign and for Sony as well, when you talk about not really relying on APIs and things like that, do you have your own specific operating system instead of working with BrightSign OS, or how does all that work?  Jose Behar: In the case of BrightSign, we don't have an operating system because they have their own, but we can control the player without using almost any of their APIs, and only using their application, that is, an operating system. We are almost ready in about four to six weeks to release a new version for Android. So we have a partnership with C Labs, the players that are based here in Dallas too, and in that case, we are more into the players. So we work in that sense more like an operating system, and we can control and do more things with that kind of open architecture instead of a closed architecture like BrightSign. Is that a client, ask or demand that they want as much extraneous stuff and other hooks stripped out of it so that it's clean and therefore less of a risk security and stability wise?  Jose Behar: Talking about stability and security, we have been proven to be the most robust and secure platform. That's why this client, that is one of the biggest retailers, but other clients that we have that are almost the same size don't have any issues regarding security or stability. They have even been looking for other platforms for redundancy, because in a critical income business like that, they can have another option in case something happens to Zynchro but Zynchro has been proving that it is more capable and it can show more data and more information to the clients than any other platform. Even showing and controlling the displays, the TV with serial commands, all that kind of stuff we can do, and of course, again, because of our capability of customization, we can add or remove any of the functionalities that our clients are asking for. Until the pandemic, we had a client, the biggest one in Entertainment Parks, and they asked us to have a special administrator. So nobody can mess with the imaging, nobody can mess with the pictures or with the animations, because for them it's their brand. So they used our server for all the information in the resorts, in convention centers, and even transportation. All the bus transportation, they had connected Zynchro to their main source for all the bus routes, and if the buses were coming in time or not, connecting the buses in real time.  One of our other clients, the Central Ohio Transport Authority, has connected our system to their own system where at the bus terminals and bus stations, they can show the different routes and if the bus is coming on time or not with GPS on the buses. So that's one of the biggest benefits. The other, I think the greatest benefit here is also our pricing, which is very competitive.  At this moment, looking at the market, now we are, if not the least expensive, one of the less expensive in the market because we want to have long-term relationships, not only one-shot deals.  The challenge, of course, with competing somewhat on price is how do you make money?  If you're not charging all that much per software license, part of it's obviously about scale, but how do you address that? Jose Behar: Two main things. One, as we are the owners, and we developed this 18 years ago. In the beginning, it was for the Windows platform. We are constantly creating new upgrades and updates in order to be more efficient and for the software to be more efficient as our operation to be most efficient and the second one is that the clients like the way we do support.  In the market, one of the most costly areas is support. So what we do is to reduce the support infrastructure and the support area by creating well-tested software. And being almost perfectionist of course, we are going to have a problem some time and we are going to have some  problems. But with our software, we try to have a quality assurance and a testing phase that may be longer than any other software. But with that, we can offer almost a support free platform: a platform that is very easy to use and also so robust that the client needs almost no support.  We are one of the only ones that don't have 24/7 support. We have Monday to Friday, 9-5 support with a ticket system and that's it and even with worldwide clients, it has worked pretty well, so reducing that cost in support is one of the main things that we have achieved.  You've understandably danced around the names and are only able to describe some of your larger clients. I get that the bigger the clients, the harder it is for them to give permission to talk about them and the last thing you wanna do is get on their bad side about doing that sort of thing.  But can you give me some sort of sense of scale of the footprint of your installed base?  Jose Behar: Right now, we are managing around 50,000 players in our network.  50,000?  Jose Behar: Yeah, and we're still growing. We are at different gas stations. One of the clients that I can mention is in Canada, Lexus-Toyota dealers. All the Lexus-Toyota dealers in Canada are using Zynchro for the different areas like the waiting room or the service parts and that kind of stuff. One of the clients that I can mention in order for you to see the different kinds of verticals is The Omnia nightclub at the Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. So they are using our software for this nightclub. But also all the big screens that you can see from the Vegas strip, talking about Omnia, are managed by Zynchro. So you're all over the place. I mean nightclubs and theme parks and big mass merch retailers, and auto dealers. Do you have a vertical market that you focus on, or is it kinda more of a generalist offer?  Jose Behar: Basically, right now, we are focusing on retail and hospitality, because principally, the monetizing tool is a tool that helps them a lot for self-pay projects or even generating a lot of income. But as I always say to my new clients or prospects, if you are uploading an x-ray or you are uploading a JPEG with coffee, for us, it's only a picture, it's only a file, and the same with videos. So, the only thing that we need from the client is the specific requirements in order to show them how to use Zynchro, logistically speaking.  We have a lot of functionalities, like Smart Groups. With the Smart Groups functionality, you can program Zynchro and all the content based on logical variables. So with that,, you can upload only content with tags and automatically Zynchro is going to program the content depending on your programming. For example, with distribution centers, the administrator of the distribution center can upload images with the tag “distribution center one”, and automatically Zynchro is going to deploy all the images. In that sense, talking about administration, we have unlimited users, so those users can be organized by a matrix with different kinds of permissions. So you can even have your advertising agency only with the permission to upload content, or you can have the marketing director only to approve content, different kinds of directors only to see reports in real time, or a full administrator that can do everything on the platform.  In that sense, we have clients that use our content management services because they don't have the personnel to do it, so the advertising agencies and the headquarters send us all the content. Or we have other types of clients that have a specialist area where they manage all the content with their clients and sell the spaces. What you offer is on a SaaS basis, right?  Jose Behar: Yeah, we are SaaS based, but with an annual fee.  With your larger clients, some of these “whale accounts”, are they also doing SaaS, or do you have a variation of an on-premise for them?  Jose Behar: No. Because with that, we can be responsible for everything that is happening. We have experienced a lot of different issues in the past with having installed the server on premises where sometimes nobody takes the responsibility of any of the issues or it goes from the hardware to the server, software to the hardware, and with infinite meetings. We prefer to take all the responsibility, and when we have an issue, it's better and easier to detect where the issue is.  For your larger clients, I suspect that almost every week, there's some competing company trying to work their way into your deal. Basically, take you out. How do you kind of address that with your clients?  Jose Behar: Being the best, and always trying to do our best work solving their issues. One of the things that all our clients appreciate about us is that, as we are responsible for the whole network, we are able with our system to detect a lot of different issues, even with different kinds of hardwares, so our platform also can send automatic alerts via sms or emails, and we have developed different kinds of automated detecting and self-correcting functionalities.  So each day, with every upgrade, we have fewer and fewer issues and our team that is in charge of detecting the different kinds of problems or issues is very specialized, and we have a long time doing this, so we have detected almost all the problems, and 90% of the problems in our experience are hardware related. And even though we are not in charge of the hardware, we are still able to detect even if a cable is broken.  So in that sense, solving problems is the main thing that the clients like about us and being neutral as we don't sell hardware, we are not compromised to any brand. We are neutral and we can say anything and say everything that we need to say without compromising our commercial status. Does your software stack work with smart displays like the Samsung Tizen OS and LG Web OS?  Jose Behar: Last year, we launched the Tizen application. For the Tizen application, of course, because of the hardware we have different restrictions compared to a full player. But yes, we are now working with Tizen.  That idea was also to save money for our clients. That is our mantra. Our mantra is to create an income or to save money for our clients. With Tizen and with the service they support, everything is about saving money, because they make a playlist or maybe only show very easy content so they don't need to buy a full installation of players and splitters or whatever, only a connected TV, and that's it.  So with the support that we are offering, they are also saving a lot of money without sending surveys or people to every store or every area only to see if the system is working. We have been able to detect black screens and automatically report the black screens, even when in parallel with our software, we are trying to solve the issue with automated functionalities.  It's interesting because a lot of people generally in the industry and more broadly, just in general, would look at some of these very large clients to think, they're not gonna be all out concerned about hardware costs and month to month subscription costs and things like that because they're making bags of money and they're so big, but, they got so big because they worry about every nickel and dime, right? Jose Behar: Oh, of course. If you multiply only an SD card by thousands, you're gonna have to invest millions of dollars and with players or with even a cable, if you need HDMI cables, long cables with amplifiers or whatever, you're talking about millions of dollars, but it is also about buying the hardware, it also about the maintenance of the hardware. Once this hardware is installed, sometimes it's installed in an area that is difficult to access or is difficult for the IT department to be trained in a  timely manner. Our first concern is always to have the correct installation. We also help our clients with defining all the engineering layouts so they can have the best maintenance through the years. We had some clients, for example, that at this time, they're not even able to change a player even though it's a very old area because of the architecture of the area, so they are finding ways to do what they need to do without opening the wall for that kind of stuff.  Sometimes these people, as you said, don't even think about the installation or what kind of resources they will need in the ongoing activities, like with only energy, we have been able to detect that going black in the stores when they close or at different times we are able to save them millions of dollars in only energy. And that's why we can also control the TVs and we can have all the information about the TV, because with the idea of the displays, we can know how many hours they have left or when they are gonna need to replace the display or the splitter or whatever. You mentioned working with Sony Semiconductor earlier. What is that about? I believe it's a computer vision system called Aitrios?  Jose Behar: Aitrios is a camera that added the layer for AI, so with that camera, we can detect gaze and face detection, not recognition. Recognition at this moment is illegal, and you need a database for a lot of phases or whatever.  The idea here is to have a detection for two objectives, the first one is to have a report about how many people are in front of the display, their gender, age and also where they are looking because they can be in front of the display, but looking the other way, and they are one of the first hardwares that also can catch a lot of people at the same time, not only one person.  So one objective is to have those kinds of reports in order for decision makers to have more contentless content because sometimes they have to pay royalties for the content, but if they don't have a lot of people, and adding the analytics that we have with the clicks and all the information about the experience was used, they can make better decisions. In my point of view, the best objective of that is reacting in real time. So you can trigger content based on your audience in real time. So if you have a male around 50 years old in front of the TV, and looking directly at the TV, you can program it to automatically trigger maybe a Black & Decker advertisement. But if it's a female around 30 years old, looking directly at the TV from a distance of four to five feet, you are going to trigger a female orientation advertisement. So, now, segmentation is the name of the game. So you have people at the store who are there to buy already, but if you can also show them something that it's segmented for, then it's more probable that they are going to buy it or get a promotion for. So this is Sony Semiconductor as opposed to the Sony Pro Display Business unit. Do they work hand in hand on this, or is it a separate thing completely?  Jose Behar: Right now, it's a completely separate thing, Aitrios and Bravia, but also we are starting talks with Bravia to integrate Zynchro into Bravia like we did with Tizen, Samsung. Because I believe Sony has Android TV, I believe, right?  Jose Behar: Yes, Bravia is based on Android, the commercial specs and we are looking into that, doing some research. In the future, we may be able to have both in the same application. All right, so your company's in Dallas. Is everybody working out of a Dallas office, or are you dispersed?  Jose Behar: No, we are completely dispersed. It was like 12 years ago that we decided to start doing home office for all the programmers. They like it more because they can be with their families and also for some of them, it's like their hobby. They love what they do, right? So sometimes they work at night or sometimes when their family is watching a movie or whatever, they're still working, and as we have a lot of developers in Mexico, the idea was to help them avoid traffic, to avoid criminal issues. There are a lot of security issues in Mexico, so between traffic and all the criminal stuff, their efficiency went up more than 30%.  How many people are in the company now?  Jose Behar: We are a team of twenty seven. Wow. You've got some monster clients for a company that's in relative terms is quite small. Jose Behar: The thing here is that we have a lot of experience developing since the beginning of multimedia touch screens. So we have a lot of experience developing programming and how to do things more efficiently.  All right. It was great to finally have a chat and understand a bit more about your company. It's one of those ones I've heard about here and there, and now I know more, and as do our listeners. Thank you very much.  Jose Behar: Thank you so much for the opportunity and for your time. I appreciate it.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Digital menu boards have long been marketed and positioned as a way to deal digitally with how what's available to order can change through a business day. I'd argue much of the critical thinking around how to do menu boards well hasn't progressed much beyond ensuring the item descriptions and prices are large enough for customers to read from the other side of an order counter. New York-based software and services firm SmarterSign has been in the digital signage industry for coming on 20 years, and has found something of a niche in working with QSR chains on optimized menu boards that are not only legible and visually pleasing, but boost sales performance for operators. Co-founder Gregg Zinn has an interest and passion for the science of advertising and marketing, and he's started writing a series called Digital Menu Board Mastery that gets into the design and psychological weeds of how to lay out and manage menu boards that influence customer ordering decisions and drive higher profits for operators. In this podcast, we get into some interesting things that most menu board sellers and users have probably never considered - stuff like psychological pricing anchors and the so-called golden zones for menu layouts. It's a really interesting chat ... Greg, thank you for joining me. Just to get started, can you give me a rundown on SmarterSign, what it is, how long you've been around, that sort of thing?  Gregg Zinn: Sure. Thank you very much for having me. SmarterSign was founded in 2006, so we've been doing this for just short of 20 years and it was founded by me and my primary business partner, Peter. We got together and both came from technology consulting, building applications for larger organizations, helping them understand how to use technology to make their businesses operate better.  I had actually done some digital signage. My first digital signage was done at Mall of America in the mid 90s working with Mel Simon, I have always been very intrigued by it. I had this vision of a Blade Runner future, where every surface was a communication vehicle and I was just very fascinated with the concept of digital signage, and I also saw that it was gonna be a burgeoning industry that had a lot of runway for the industry to grow and when we looked at the industry, we really found that there were two kinds of providers in the industry, and you probably remember back then, there were providers who were very technology oriented like Cisco, who were very good at moving data around networks, but didn't really have a lot of tools for content control. And there were companies like Scala who had a great software platform, a really powerful software platform, but it didn't really allow business operators to take complete control, and we saw that as the sweet spot for digital signage is moving business operators closer to their message and being able to impact their communication, whether it was in a corporate communication environment, a retail environment, or really what became our biggest market, which is food service, restaurants, digital menu boards.  I think a lot of the reason why digital menu boards became such a big and important part of our business is because of this approach of moving that communication control closer to the business operator. We've spent close to 20 years really working on perfecting as much as we can the tools to bring that vision to life.  So would you describe the company as a CMS software company or more of a solutions firm?  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, that's a great question. So really we view ourselves as two parts of the same solution. One is, one is a software provider that provides great software for controlling digital signage networks, and that's end-to-end from content creation, scheduling, distribution, and playback, and then the other piece is really the services piece of it, and I think that is equally important to the software piece of it, because these business operators are using a new tool, even business operators who have been doing it for 15 years, it's still relatively new to them. So being able to provide that layer of service and support underneath them, and when I say service and support, I'm not just saying, here's how to use our software. I'm talking about how to use this tool for your business. Here are the business opportunities for you. Here are the things that you can do with these tools. I think it's really important, and, for me, as part of the business, it's been a big focus, and I try to influence the software development to accommodate as much of that as possible and make it as intuitive as possible. But a lot of it is just working with business operators, so the service piece of it is really important.  Where's the company based?  Gregg Zinn: Our headquarters is in New York and I am based in Chicago. I moved to Chicago, just short of eight years ago. My wife's family is from Chicago. I was living in Chelsea in Manhattan, and my young sons are getting to school age and New York City is very challenging for raising children. We were living in 700 square feet in Chelsea and the truth is, it was fantastic. I love New York. I'm a New Yorker through and through. But my wife's family is from the Chicagoland area, the suburbs of Chicago, and we decided to pick up and move here, and now instead of looking at concrete and windows, I'm looking at a lake.  Yeah, it's good to have that relief valve as well, the in-laws and extended family where you can say, “hey, we need to do this, can you guys take the kids?” Plus they see more of their family.  Gregg Zinn: It's incredible. We do Sunday dinners and I love having the family around and it's great for me, it's great for my boys and now they're getting on in their teen years and doing all that stuff and it's great to see them grow up in this environment. I got in touch because I noticed on LinkedIn you posted a piece about Menu Board Mastery and I clicked through and had to look at it and I thought, oh, this is interesting because as somebody's been around digital signage as long as you, maybe not quite a few, mid 90s, I only got in late 90s, but nonetheless, we've both been around it a long time. I know that menu boards can be done badly, but I tend to think they're done badly when they're eye charts and there's way too much stuff on there, or quite simply, they're just not working. But your Menu Board Mastery pieces take a look at the science of it and of layout and the thinking and everything else. So I thought that would make a great conversation to get into, first of all why you felt it useful to put this together and then get into some of the key tenets of it.  Gregg Zinn: Really the thing is, I've had so many conversations with business operators, at all levels, and that could be from single location operators to multinational operators and all of them seem to struggle with putting a strategic foundation underneath the concept of what they're gonna display, and even this many years into it, many of them just see digital as a more efficient way to get their print menu up on the screen, and even when they were doing their print menu, I don't really believe that they were tapping into some of the core ideas of using this as an incredible marketing tool.  When I look at digital menus, I think a digital menu should be your perfect salesperson. If you could have that person talking to that customer and guiding them through consuming from your restaurant in a way that is ideal for you, and ideal for them, having it be the perfect salesperson. I think that's really important, and a lot of businesses have struggled to do that. So I took a look at this, and I thought, what if I put a series together that takes very interesting, proven, scientific complex ideas and makes them highly practical? And this has really been a core philosophy for me since I was a teenager.  When I first read BF Skinner's Beyond Friedman Dignity and David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man, I became fascinated with how people interact with information and how behavior is impacted by communications, and those various tools and many boards are no different. So I thought about giving people some very practical ideas. I want to make this industry better, like ever since we started SmarterSign, I don't want to just have a great business in the industry. I want this industry to be important. I want this industry to really impact businesses and be indispensable as part of the complete operation for every business. Obviously that helps my business. But it also energizes me. It engages me.  Another key piece of my philosophy has always been moving people from theory to practice as quickly and easily as possible. Nobody ever said theory makes perfect. Practice makes perfect and helps people move to practice practical ideas and I use the phrase, “Is this practical?” all the time. You can have all of these great ideas and all of these visions for what can be, and you can sit there and ruminate, but really, when it comes down to it, where the rubber meets the road is where value is created, and can you put this into practice was the vision behind this series. The first article that you put out was about visual attention. When you talk about visual attention, what do you mean? Apart from the obvious.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and it's funny because there are some very obvious things, but there also are some well-studied scientific understandings about how people's eyes move in the interpretation of information and I think in the article, we point out two very well-known, established patterns of how people interact with information.  There is the F-pattern of how your eyes scan information, and that is typically for menus or information that is very text rich, and your eyes go across the top and then they go down to the middle and then across a little bit more, and then they go down to the left hand side and understanding the way that people's eyes are gonna be moving across your information helps you prioritize where you put your information that's important to your business, and I want to talk about what information is important to your business because getting to businesses do not really know how to take advantage of this tool. I think this is a really important piece of it, and I am going to be writing an article about this, and it's been a big focus as well.  But let me continue on with the other way that people interpret information, and that is The Golden Triangle, and it starts in the middle, moves to the upper right, moves to the left, and these two visual patterns have been proven time and time again with eye trackers and studies to see how people interpret visual information in front of them. The Golden Triangle is very helpful for highly visual menus, and really the key spot in that menu is that upper right hand corner. If you can put your really high value items in that upper right hand corner, you are going to see a change in your outcomes, for the better. It's such an interesting thing, and this is part of getting back to why the series is here. I want to be able to provide tidbits of information like that to help businesses change their outcome, and obviously for the better.  Is this something you discovered or you've known because you've had that interest for a very long time in it? I'm curious if you started working with QSRs and restaurant chains and advocated doing this, and then did the reading and found out, oh, there's actually a science behind this.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it's really a mixture of both because I had studied these concepts, and they were very interesting to me, all the way back in the 90s. They were very interesting ideas to me. Even before that, managing behavior was always interesting to me. But as I started to work in the practical environment of working with businesses, I was able to apply those ideas and see how they impacted. So I was able to grow a clear understanding of how these ideas very specifically relate to these types of business problems. So it has been a full circle since I was interested in it, I was able to apply it, and now I'm able to move and help businesses perfect it.  So one of the things you get into is positioning, like what should go where and how you wanna have prime positions for your high margin items and signature items, that sort of thing. I've not thought about that at all. I've just thought that companies just laid things out the way they laid out their print menus and didn't really think too much about that stuff, or maybe they don't.  Gregg Zinn: Many of them don't think about it and actually very early on, working with businesses, 2006-2007, I had come up with this idea called The Prominence Pyramid. The idea behind The Prominence Pyramid was to help businesses identify. What are the most important menu items on your menu? And most businesses couldn't identify it. I was really surprised to walk into the c-suites of large organizations and ask them very simple questions about what are the most important items on their menu and they were not able to answer that.  But we would guide businesses through this process of putting items on a pyramid, say at the top of the pyramid. These are the most important items for you, and they're the most important for top line revenue. They're the most important for margin, they're the most important in terms of branding and customer experience, and those are the items that should have prominence within your visual space because they're the ones that are gonna help push your business forward. There are so many moving parts to this as we're moving forward, and as AI has become part of the mix of tools, it's a very exciting time for me because I feel like we can use these tools to help give insights very quickly to businesses using real data using, using these known scientific ideas to help them get these ideas in front of them, and then once you know that, once you know what should be presented in these prominent areas in the visual space, then you could do things like change the sizing, change the coloring, add boxes around them, animate those sections, put little tags, customer favorites.  Actually, we have a customer who just did this who just did this. He wanted to promote this one item, so we put a tag that said “Customer favorite” and sales immediately increased on this item. So we know that these tools can help change business outcomes. It's just a matter of helping businesses get there. And I think this series is gonna help people get there in bite-sized movements.  So when you talk about things like prime positions, that's in your F-pattern or Golden Triangle, there's certain positions that are gonna be optimal. That's where the eye goes naturally?  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy to think that these are actually things, but they've proven, studied, scientifically that this is the way eyes move to interpret information.  So some of the other variables, and you've already mentioned it, are things like white space and borders around stuff, contrast, the font size.  To me, being a knucklehead and not really spending a lot of time talking about QSRs, I just see ones where I can't read this, and my eyesight's assisted, but when I've had my glasses on, it's 2020, and I still struggle to read it.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it drives me crazy and I don't know if you have seen this, but I can send you a link to it. I had done a series called the Digital Menu Board Scorecard, and it was an evaluation of menu boards in the wild, not necessarily SmarterSign customers. But menu boards that we had seen, we'd take pictures of them, and we'd break down what are they were doing well, what are they doing poorly and we give them a score on a number of characteristics like branding, layout, organization, and actually, it's funny, just last week I was in the airport and I saw a menu from a pretty big QSR, and I just thought: Who made this menu? This is just terrible.  I won't mention their name because I don't want to get in trouble.  When you did the scorecard, were you handing out as many “A”s?  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, there were some As, there were few, very few, but every once in a while we'd come across a menu board where the business had a really good balanced sense of brand presentation, strategic organization, overall design, effectiveness of the menu to get people to order. That's actually one of the key things when you look at menus. Outside of getting their attention, it is how quickly can you get somebody through the process of making a decision and this is particularly true for digital drive-through, has been a real focus and we've seen some really interesting things done in that realm. For example, having the menu change at 8:00 PM to be a more limited menu on the drive-through, so that it changes the operations from a kitchen point of view, but also gets people through the line quicker.  One of the questions I wanted to ask was, is the thinking and the layouts and everything else different between the screens over the counter, the screens in a self-service ordering kiosk, and then the screens in the drive-through? Gregg Zinn: Yeah, absolutely, and if you look at our customers who are doing interior menu boards and exterior menu boards, the layouts, the structures, the approach to the menus are different. It's just different. It's a different mind frame. It's almost a different form factor in many cases because a lot of times the drive through's gonna be portrait, and many times the interior board's gonna be landscape.  But the whole business mission is really different, and taking advantage of what each of those environments do better. We don't do any touchscreen ordering. I have a love-hate relationship with the concept of it. I'm old school. So when I go into a sandwich shop, I want to talk to the person who is going to be able to take down my details of what I want, and I want to be able to say them and have them articulate that to the kitchen. Personally, I find it very difficult to do the touchscreen ordering and get that right and have the same level of customer experience.  AI is gonna change that because AI is going to somehow offer voice to AI ordering, which will take some of that UI cloudiness out of the mix. You mentioned AI. I'm curious about computer vision and the idea that, I've heard this said, I don't know what it is really being done in-store. I've heard about it in drive-throughs, but dynamically adjusting menus based on the profile of the people who are approaching the counter. Gregg Zinn: Yeah, there's a few things that we've been working with in terms of studying, how this can be done in an effective way. It's a highly strategic concept and, as I mentioned earlier, businesses are really just struggling to translate their static menu to a digital menu in a very strategic way, but we're pushing this forward, and there are other technologies.  There's license plate reader technology for drive-throughs where the same car is coming through, and you could tie it to their past consumption and we're gonna get there, and I think with AI, we're gonna get there much quicker and I'm super happy about that. Because I have been sitting in the running blocks waiting for the gun to go off and I'm excited about what AI means to accelerate some of this progress.  When you started, almost 20 years ago now, APIs were known but they weren't widely available and I suspect it was very difficult to talk to a restaurant about actually jacking into their restaurant management systems in any way, but we're now in a very different world, and that's all possible.  Is it being done? And how do you best leverage that other than the very simple stuff like price changes in the store system, you want to automatically change on the screen? Gregg Zinn: Right now the two primary mechanisms that are interacting, that operating data with the marketing data on menu boards, are price changes. So having the POS system be the source of that price, that's your operating data, and that operating data points should be filtered through to your menu boards. You shouldn't have to manage it in two pieces.  The second piece is inventory. We work with a lot of customers who run out of individual products, and that creates frustration for the customer, and it creates frustration for the person taking the order. So having the ability to show that something's currently sold out, is something that we're seeing being used. Again, this comes down to: Can so much more be done? Yeah, so much more can be done.  But getting over that, what should be done, as opposed to what can be done. It's also part of my core philosophy is, a lot of things can be done, but only some things should be done. So we've stayed away from novelty. We've stayed away from a lot of the things that people are saying, whoa, what about this? What about that? We try to keep it as practical as possible. But we're gonna see a big shift. I don't know if you know the company Palantir. I love Palantir as a company. I love what their vision for using AI is. People ask me questions about it all the time because I'm in technology. People ask me about AI people who are late, not in the technology industry, and late people, and I always point to Palantir as somebody who is an applied AI company. They're using the data to determine what should be done as opposed to what could be done and I think they're doing a really great job of it. They're really leaders in that space. Now, they're not menu boards, but I do follow what they're doing because I think that they're very innovative in terms of how they're looking at the connection between data operations, real world and practical application. In my years doing consulting, I've done quite a bit with some big companies, but the only QSR I worked with was a coffee chain and when I went in to start working with them, they talked about a bunch of things and I asked them about menu boards and takeovers, which I had seen in some of their stores where all of the menus went away and they had a tiled piece of creative, pedaling a particular promoted product and they said that they did some interview intercepts with customers and pretty uniformly the customer said, stop screwing around, just show me the damn menu, and I've since been in a number of restaurants where I had to wait for the menu items that came up because they were promoting something or other on the screen for 5-10 seconds and it irritated the living hell out of me. Is it something you advocate? Just get to the point; don't try to be fancy here. Forget the video, just show me the items and pricing.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, intuitively for me, that customer response is obvious. They're trying to interact with a piece of data to place an order, and then all of a sudden it's gone and they're waiting. They have no idea how long it's gonna be before it comes back, and then they've gotta go find their spot on the menu again. So intuitively for me, we have always guided people against it. We've had customers asked to do it. Of course, our platform can do it. But it is not a good idea. Now, that being said, with digital menu boards and you've seen them in QSRs, there's a lot of visual space, so you can use a portion of that visual space to do those kinds of marketing techniques. One of the really interesting things that we had seen, so we did an observational study of a food court, working with a customer who had a restaurant, a pizza restaurant, and a food court. We did an observational study, and we saw that nobody looked up at the menu when they came over to the counter to order. They didn't care about the pricing, they didn't care about anything. They never looked up. But the menu boards were not being used properly to get people over to their restaurant as a choice. So what we recommended was: these really aren't digital menu boards in so much as they're digital billboards, and you need to use these as a “come eat pizza” sign, as opposed to thinking of it as a digital menu board. So we used some of the visual space as a “come eat pizza”, and we were able to draw some of that audience thinking maybe they'd go get Chinese food or Chipotle or another option over to them. So that's another way where you can impact outcomes by using the visual space as opposed to just menu boards.  What do you do with restaurants? I think about one up here, Tim Horton's here in Canada that started out doing coffee and donuts and pastries and now does endless kinds of food items, and they've got a menu list that's far longer than it was when the chain first started.  What do you do when you have customers who have like 40 SKUs and you've only got so much real estate on a screen?  Gregg Zinn: It's a big challenge, and it's a funny thing because, when I look at operations like that, I've never run a restaurant, but when I think of the ideal process to get customers through and order your food, I think of a business like In and Out Burger. They've got a very specific menu. People come there for those items. They love those items.  We have a lot of customers who have these extensive menus. I don't love it from an operations point of view, but from a presentation of the menu point of view, it's a matter of just being very organized in how you present that information so that you are able to get that broad menu into somebody's eyes, get them to where they want to order. If they want something that's savory as opposed to something sweet, get their eyes to that.  A good example of that is Dairy Queen has a pretty extensive menu, and they've got food and ice creams and just being able to segment that out. So on their drive-throughs, for example, we do a number of franchisees for Dairy Queen. On their drive-throughs, they've got one complete panel, that's just their sweet treats. They've got a middle panel that is promotion, key promotional items, LTOs and things like that, and then they have a right screen that is their savory items, their burgers and sandwiches and hot dogs and things.  The post that you have up right now about this Mastery series has to do with price anchors. That's not a term I know much about. What do you mean by that?  Gregg Zinn: It's another behavioral technique where you can establish a baseline in a customer's mind by putting an item that you don't really expect anybody to consume, but what it does is it creates a mental baseline of price expectation, so that you can have them pay a premium price for that second level item, without feeling like this is too expensive. So it really is a decoy. It's like look over here, this item is $30, but here's a really good value item at $22. It's so interesting to me because particularly in the past five years, pricing's gotten outta control, and, for so many reasons. Supply chain issues, obviously going back to 2020 with Covid but pricing has gotten crazy, and my favorite burger place in New York City, actually where I got engaged, when I got engaged, the burger was, yeah, I'm a huge burger guy, but it was my second date with my wife. We went there, and we're both burger people, and that's where I proposed ultimately.  You got engaged on our second date?  Gregg Zinn: Oh, no, we went on our second date to this burger place. Seven years later, we got engaged, but in that same spot, but the burger was like $6 at that point, and now it's like 18.  Oh, for God's sake.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and even the QSRs I go into sometimes, and I just think, who could afford $60 for a family of four?  It just doesn't seem like an affordable approach and I will tell you that from a pricing strategy point of view, all of the QSRs are recognizing this, and they're trying to adapt. We're already out of time, but I wanted to ask one more question, just around when you're going into a new customer and you start talking about what we've just discussed, kind of the science and the thinking behind it, are minds a little bit blown because they're wanting to do digital menu boards because it's a pain in the ass to change the print ones, and they haven't thought much beyond that? Gregg Zinn: We take it slow. It's been over 20 years and we've learned you can't just go in gangbusters and put all of these ideas in their heads about what's possible because it'll just confuse the situation. So we go slow with our customers. We meet them where they are. Fix the first obvious problem, and then you can go from there. Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and I've said it a number of times in this call if it's not practical, it can't be done.  All right. This was great. If people wanna find out more about SmarterSign and read these articles, they can find 'em on smartersign.com.  Gregg Zinn: They can, yeah. All the articles are there. In the resource section, right? Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and we've got a bunch of videos on our YouTube channel, of course, posting on other social channels like LinkedIn. But yeah, the primary source would be on smartersign.com.  Perfect. All right. Thank you, sir.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, thank you so much. It was really nice talking to you and re-meeting you again.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The next plus-sized pro AV trade show on the annual calendar is InfoComm, coming up in mid-June in, yuck, Orlando, Florida. I'm always curious about what will be new and different with the show, and that's particularly the case in 2025, because there's a new person running things. Jenn Heinold joined show owner/operator AVIXA late last year as the Senior VP Expositions, Americas, so for the last several weeks she's been in drinking-from-the-firehose mode as she learns more and more about the industry, ecosystem and how people think about and use InfoComm. Heinold is a lifer in the trade show business, and while she has run tech-centric trade shows, pro AV is new to her. We had a really good conversation that gets into her impressions and thoughts about the industry, her perspective on ISE, the AVIXA co-owned sister show, and plans for what will be her first InfoComm in June - including what will be different and new. We also get into what, if anything, will be affected by all the trade and geopolitical turmoil that's bubbled up since the US presidency had its four year shuffle. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jenn, thank you very much for coming on. You've been on the job for how long now?  Jenn Heinold: I've been with AVIXA for just over three months. I joined in December as the Senior Vice President of Expositions for the Americas, and I'm over InfoComm in the U.S., which will be June 11th through the 13th in Orlando, Florida and then I'm also responsible for our new InfoComm America Latina launch event, which will be in October in Mexico City.  Did you know anything about the Pro AV sector before you got involved?  Jenn Heinold: No, honestly. I ran the largest satellite technology show in the U.S. for 15 years. So I've worked in technology, but Pro AV is different and I find myself now everywhere I go looking for display screens and how audio sounds. It's so fascinating how quickly you become immersed within the industry and you notice that it's everywhere and it makes our experiences better.  You'll be a display nerd in no time.  Jenn Heinold: I'm working on it. So have you always been in the trade show business?  Jenn Heinold: I have, yes, I dedicated my career to trade shows. I am super passionate about what happens in a face-to-face environment. I love the serendipity of it. I love that what I do helps businesses grow. The community aspect is amazing, right? Bringing people together with a common goal or challenge. The education that we can provide at trade shows. You can do a month's worth of meetings in three days. You can do a trip around the world in three days in some cases, right?  So I just love the format and really believe in what it can do for businesses and I'm excited to produce InfoComm. Because you had some background working with technology trade shows, has there been much of a learning curve? Setting apart the obvious that there are different companies and all that, but I guess their needs aren't all that dissimilar, are they?  Jenn Heinold: No, I think the commonality in working on technology shows is that you have the same structure where there are channel partners that are working to sell and integrate products, but then you also have all of the end users who use a specific technology. So I think it's important for us to be a forum for both Pro AV as well as our end-user audiences, and make sure that they each are fulfilled and feel welcome at the show and find value in the show.  You went to Integrated Systems Europe a few weeks ago, I saw you there. That was your first big Pro AV trade show, I assume, and I'm curious about your impressions.  Jenn Heinold: Oh, gosh, I was blown away by ISE. How could you not be? But for me, I was just so impressed by what the exhibitors did on the show floor. They really pulled out all the stops for ISE and the energy is amazing. It was so valuable for me to see the technology all together in real life, and then also to be able to meet with exhibitors here directly to know what are your strategic priorities for 2025 and beyond. Who should I be focusing on making sure that I have at the show, so it's the best for our exhibitors and our attendees alike?  I'm sure you were walking around with people like your boss Dave Labuskes both at ISE and InfoComm. Did you get some sense that ISE is its own thing? InfoComm runs differently. Yes, there are the same vendors and everything else, but apart from the obvious of Barcelona versus Orlando or Las Vegas, it does do things differently in some respects, at least. Jenn Heinold: Yeah, absolutely. I unfortunately don't yet have the comparison for InfoComm. I know what our plans are and what we're focusing on. ISE clearly has an amazing global footprint and InfoComm, while it is international, does skew a little bit more to North America just based on the location.  I think we at InfoComm have a much more training program and educational offering, which I really think is valuable. We need to not only nurture our current workforce and make sure that they have all the tools they need to succeed, but focus on the next generation as well, and I'm really proud that InfoComm does that. One of the things about ISE, as you said, there's not as much of a focus on training, there are certainly conferences and things like that, but it's more aimed at end users.  Do you find that you're getting exhibitors and other people saying, hey, it would be great if we had more end users if there was more kind of focus on that part of it, as opposed to, I sometimes refer to InfoComm is something of a gearhead show, and I don't mean that negatively, but it attracts the people who are going to go look at things like cable connectors and mounting infrastructure and so on and stuff that maybe somebody who's an experiential designer for a creative tech shop maybe doesn't care that much about. Jenn Heinold: Yeah. I will say that for 2025, we definitely are emphasizing the end-user audience. They are a key segment for us. Actually, one of the first things I did within my first week, Dave, was look at our end-user segments and compare what groups naturally grew when we were in Orlando versus Las Vegas, right? Just who organically was coming to the show and what I saw was a big increase in education when we're in Orlando, house of worship, retail, restaurants, and hospitality. None of this probably surprises you, but as we built out our marketing campaign, we've decided to really double down our investment on those segments that are organically growing in Orlando. I grew up in trade shows and marketing, so this has really been a passion project for me. Making sure that we have the right audience in InfoComm 2025 is my number one priority and I had to prioritize when I started at AVIXA so I had six months to really execute the show. So if there is one thing that I'm focused on day in and day out, it's the audience at InfoComm this year. When you say audience, are you hearing from exhibitors that they want to see more I end users or they want to see more partners because I think of an InfoComm as being a hyper-efficient way for a manufacturer to have a touch with a whole bunch of existing and potential resellers, and maybe not as worried about having like General Motors or some big retailer walking around.  Jenn Heinold: I hear both, Dave, and I think distributors and integrators are a super important part of the ecosystem, just as the end users are. We are putting more end users on Stage on the show floor this year, as well as within our conference program and I think, having the end users talk about how they are using AV technology only drives more end users to come to the show. That's what they want to hear, right? Uses cases of how they had successful installations, and how they have better employee engagement because of their conferencing and collaboration tools. We've got some retailers actually who will present how they're deploying AV technology in their stores, and what it's doing to improve their business. So we are making a real focus on that piece along with, of course, all the traditional content and certification we offer for the gearheads, as you said. I assume that's a bit of a tactic as well in, that if you invite, the Head of Digital for a big bank or big retail or whatever it may be to the show to do a speaking gig, there's a decent chance he or she is gonna bring some other people with them and then you've got people with big bank on the name tag walking around the show and you're able to talk about, look at the kinds of companies we're attracting. Jenn Heinold: That's absolutely a tactic. The other tactic is when we market to these end-user segments, and they go to our website, perhaps cold, having not really known much about InfoComm, and they see like-minded people on the website speaking, they realize it's an event for them too.  When you got involved, was there a discussion about how are things working right now? The old line about, if it ain't broke, don't fix it? Or were there things that you were told that are where we would like to grow, here's like where we would like to change things, that sort of thing?  Jenn Heinold: Yeah, I mentioned some of the deep dive I took into the show data when I first started. I also read the last five or so years' Exhibitor and Attendee Surveys. In reading those, one thing that bubbled up was just the onsite experience overall, and it is hard when you compare a U.S.-based show to an ISE at the Fira Barcelona is lovely and the food options are really healthy and great, and, unfortunately, we're a little bit behind in the United States on those things, but we are making  It's mind-blowing.  Jenn Heinold: It is a little embarrassing sometimes, but, I will tell you, I have already met with the team in Orlando. I actually was there about three weeks ago and talked about how we want to upgrade the food and beverage experience, have healthier options, and have more seating. So you will see an upgrade in the onsite experience as well.  That's something that we've done mindfully. When you have a better experience, you want to spend more time on the show floor, right? So, there's definitely another strategic priority for us.  Might as well talk about it now, I, people like me would be very happy if we never went to Orlando or Las Vegas again, and in the past, long before your time, InfoComm did move around a little bit. I remember the first one I went to was in Anaheim, and then it got in this rota of, back and forth between Orlando and Las Vegas.  Is that a finite thing or is that just how things are going to be?  Jenn Heinold: I don't think it's finite. The reality is InfoComm can fit in about five convention centers in the United States based on its size and Orlando and Vegas are two of them. Chicago could be an option, Atlanta, and New Orleans might work, but there are just not that many venues that can hold a show of our size, and also where the cities have the infrastructure to host us, so we are a little hamstrung that way.  I'm not opposed to looking at other cities. I think when we look at different cities, of course, we look at the cost structure. We look at the audience that is within a couple of hundred-mile radius and how accessible it is for air travel and everything else. I'm not opposed to it. We do have quite a few years booked already for Orlando and Las Vegas, but it's definitely something that I'm looking into.  If you come to the show, you'll see a lot of questions about our future cities and where we might be in the post-show survey, because it's something that I'd like to look into in the future. You've only been with AVIXA for three to four months, so you don't have a reference point for last year, but I'm going to ask anyway, what's going to be different this year with the show?  Jenn Heinold: Yeah, I mentioned our focus on the audience. That is a big priority for us. We always do local tours where you're able to see Avian Action. But this year I'm really proud that we're in Orlando. We've got a few new tours added to the schedule. One is, the Cirque de Soleil show behind the scenes in Disney Springs. We are going back to the University of Central Florida. We're also doing a large mega-church in Orlando for a house of worship tour. So we've added some fresh content there.  We also have a brand new panel discussion that we're launching this year called 2030 Vision. It will be moderated by Dave Labuskes, and we've got three visionaries from our industry, plus an end user up on stage to talk about what Pro AV look like in 2030, and what are the factors shaping our market. Our visionaries will be from Shure, Crestron, and Diversified. I'm really excited about having some different content models at InfoComm.  I talked earlier about the upgraded experiences. Again, we're really being mindful about making the event more comfortable and enjoyable to be a part of. I think in the last couple of years, AVIXA has really put a push on AVIXA Exchange and AVIXA TV. So I get a sense there's a lot more effort to educate the ecosystem and also use very modern ways to do it. It's not just the written word and case studies and so on. You're doing a lot of proper broadcast studio on-site at ISE and I assume probably something similar at Orlando.  Jenn Heinold: Yeah, absolutely. We'll have our AVIXA TV studios. The coolest thing about that, beyond being able to watch some of the interviews as they are recorded live, is that you get to see a fully functional broadcast studio on the show floor, right? You get to see how technology converges. It's not about just one box. It's about the whole solution and being able to present the whole solution is really special for us.  We've also got three stages. You mentioned AVIXA TV, that's more of a campfire format, right? So huddle around, and talk about different challenges that we're facing. We have our technology innovation stage which is really about highlighting new products that are coming to market and then we have our innovation Spotlight Stage and with the Spotlight Stage, we will have some exhibitors presenting thought leadership, but we also have some content partners there like Digital Signage Federation Plaza. We'll talk about lighting and staging. IABM will focus on the broadcast market opportunity and specifically the intersection of broadcast AV and IT. And FutureWorks who will talk about content creation.  Are you getting into some areas that - I saw at ISE that I didn't have enough time to really get over there and look at any, but it's enough just to get through those four days - but things like drones?  Jenn Heinold: We don't have a dedicated section of the show floor for drones. But certainly, there is some content about the use of drones projection mapping, and other applications.  What about the digital signage side? Through the years, AVIXA at InfoComm has tried to do “digital signage” pavilions, zones, and all kinds of things, and then in the last two to four years, I'm not sure of the number, you've worked with the Digital Signage Federation on a conference day called D Sign. Is that being replicated this year?  Jenn Heinold: Yeah, that'll return and we also have some content with Invidis who will cover a lot of digital signage as well so it's still a huge focus for us as part of the show. One of the attempts has always been to try to create an area thematically around it, but I've always told people that's super difficult because there are exhibitors who've been at that show for 10-20 years, and they have their spot. So it's hard to just say, okay, all of you digital science companies, you go over here, the audio people maybe do. Jenn Heinold: Yes. We don't have a dedicated pavilion for digital signage, but it gets back to our conversation earlier, Dave, I think it's a little bit less about one very specific piece of technology and more about the larger application and I think that's where our industry is going, and that's why really we can't box in those digital signage providers, right? Because they're doing so much more than just just a digital signage display.  Yeah, and that applies to just about any discipline these days that everything is cross-pollinating.  Jenn Heinold: Yes. So I think you'll see certainly some applications come to life at InfoComm 2025 and it'll be an even bigger part of our event design for 2026 where we are already having those conversations around what Infocomm 2026 looks like, which is really exciting. There was some noise at ISE around some of the major exhibitors, like notably Samsung, suggesting that they're not going to be at the show, that they're pulling their big stand, and this and that, and those were swatted down at the time, but I'm curious where that's at.  Jenn Heinold: Yeah, I personally speak to Samsung about every other week and they will be participating at InfoComm 2025. Will it be in the large booth presence that they have had in the past? Quite frankly, no, but, they will be there. They will have products on display. We welcome them and we're working with them to find the right marketing solution for what their needs are today and into the future as well. I find that weird because they had a massive presence at ISE and you would think they want to be there and if they're just doing whisper rooms, that sort of thing, it seems an odd decision. Is there something behind that? I read stuff about Korean politics or whatever, Korean government stuff that may be in the way of it. Jenn Heinold: I think that's a better question for them to answer, certainly, but they will do more than just a whisper room. They will have a presence at the show and we're working with them very closely on that. And they've been great partners. We want to continue to partner with them in a way that's mutually beneficial to both. Of course. Are you seeing some new exhibitors? Again, I respect that this is all new to you, but, some significant exhibitors coming into the InfoComm that maybe didn't do in the past.  Jenn Heinold: Yeah, I'm seeing, some more kiosk manufacturers. We're hearing more and more about that. Retail seems to be a really big end-user segment. That's a priority. We Just signed up AWS and they're bringing their equivalent of the Fire Stick for digital signage to the show. So those applications are fun to see and new for us.  We are always looking at a little bit of AI technology, we're always looking to make sure that we're introducing new and innovative technology to the show floor and one of the most fulfilling things for me is when you see those new tech come in and they might come in a 10 x 10 in the far corner of the hall and then they work their way there, work their way up, and have a bigger and bigger presence. Does your team do much coaching for some of the overseas exhibitors?  I'm particularly thinking about Chinese LED manufacturers who show up at these shows and it's always been a source of frustration and bewilderment for me that they'll spend a lot of money to bring all their tech over and bring a bunch of people over, and then when I wander into their booths and start asking questions, they don't tend to have many, if any people who can speak much in the way of English. So do your people coach them by saying, “Guys, if you're gonna do this, here's our advice!”  Jenn Heinold: We do.  It doesn't necessarily work?  Jenn Heinold: We do and we also try to help our exhibitors with their marketing campaigns and how to promote their presence at the show, and how to save money. A lot of the services are deadline-driven and talk through all of those things.  Yeah, we do that. We partner with sales agents as well that are in the country and we encourage them to work with their exhibitors as well as to coach them on exhibiting. I don't know if that is not necessarily working, but I do think it's a longer process because there are so many elements that tie into that. Yeah, and it's not easy to if you're in Shenzhen or Beijing or whatever, you just logically don't have a whole bunch of English-speaking people, but, I guess it's not that easy either to hire interpreters to come over and get questions thrown at them about chip on board and pixel pitch and things like that the interpreter is not going to understand either.  Jenn Heinold: That can be a challenge. We hire some interpreters for our own staff to help interact. And, yeah, it definitely can be a challenge. I do think we are so close. You travel internationally. I travel internationally and with Google Translate and so many new AI tools, I feel like we are so close to really having some breakthrough moments with that though. It's so much easier now.  Like the Facebook glasses, and there's some other ones out there where they can do real-time translation and it'll just show up on the lens, which would be amazing for just about anything I do once I leave this country or leave this continent. Jenn Heinold: Yeah, I see it too. I'm hopeful that'll really transform our shows.  I have to ask about the current political and economic climate with tariffs and everything else. How are AVIXA and InfoComm navigating their way through some of that?  Jenn Heinold: Yeah, I think it certainly comes up quite often. I mentioned that was doing a trip in South America, Mexico last week, and I think it's a concern for our exhibitors, and what we can do is just help support their efforts. I feel really confident that our exhibitors know how to run their business and know how to do it well, and they will pivot and make adjustments I have studied the AV industry over the last few months, having joined AVIXA and having seen how our industry navigated COVID and having worked for an organization that had multiple trade shows prior where I saw a lot of industries not navigate COVID as well as the AV industry, I'm super impressed with how agile and smart our exhibitors are.  I think this is just another challenge that we face. I have every confidence that we'll be able to navigate this too.  Do you have any sense of companies deciding, given everything that's going on, really don't want to travel to the U.S. right now?  I'm Canadian, so I suspect there's a whole bunch of people north of the U.S. border who are having second thoughts about, okay, do I really want to go to Florida right now or in June with all this stuff about Canada being the 51st state and so on. Jenn Heinold: Yeah, so right now, we haven't had a lot of pushback on traveling to the United States. We have been able to maintain the exhibitors on our show floor, but it's certainly something that I'm watching very closely.  As a show organizer, I do think it's our job to make sure that everyone feels welcome and that's what I'm focusing on.  Yeah, I think most Canadians like me, I've got a bazillion friends in the U.S. and I would miss them and everything else and I don't think they're the ones who are stirring the pot here. So it's just unfortunate.  Jenn Heinold: Yes, absolutely.  We'll just leave it at that, right?  Jenn Heinold: Yeah.  So tell me about Mexico City. I'm curious how you guys, not really rationalize that, but you have to counterbalance that. Okay. If you do a show in Mexico City for LATAM, does that siphon away some of what is in InfoComm US?  Jenn Heinold: I wasn't part of the initial launch conversations, but I will tell you having managed regional portfolios of shows, in my past life and now being part of a regional portfolio show, I really think that all ships rise with the tide, Dave, and having an event in the country and more specifically, the In the native language and being able to serve that community who may not be able to travel will only lift up and put calm in the U.S. as well. So I'm really excited about it.  The pride that the local community feels to have InfoComm in their backyard is really palpable and energizing. I'm proud that we're able to do the regional event, and I do think that it'll feed even more of the audience to InfoComm in the U.S. because in many ways it's a great introduction to the brand and we can say, now you experience this and please come to the U.S.  show as well.  Finally, I'm curious how things are tracking. I know that with ISE, I heard probably eight weeks out or something like that, it was going to be very busy, probably break records, and so on. I'm curious about what you're hearing or tracking for Orlando and also for Mexico City although I know Mexico is well out.  Jenn Heinold: Yeah, so for Orlando, our show floor is about 95 percent sold. We're targeting around 410,000 net square feet of exhibit space and for registrations, we're targeting 40,000 which is back to pre-pandemic numbers. Right now we're pacing really well. I'm watching it very closely, of course, and I'd love to check-in with you a little closer to the event and be able to share since we still have a few months to go. But all the indicators are really good for InfoComm in the U.S. We actually just added some hotel room nights because we were getting full with the hotels we're seeing our website traffic, pretty significantly year over year. We have to look at the full picture, but there are some really positive early indicators for InfoComm.  It's probably a bit too early to know much about Mexico City, right? Jenn Heinold: Mexico City's registration will open up in June, actually at InfoComm in the U.S. We've sold about 80% of the show floor. It's a much smaller show floor than InfoComm in the U.S., but I'm really happy with the early interest from exhibitors and support from the local community. We're hoping for about 5,000 attendees in Mexico City. All right. Thank you very much for giving me an update.  Jenn Heinold: Thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The UK-based research and advisory firm Futuresource Consulting sends a big team every year to the ISE trade show in Barcelona, and then a few weeks later releases a big report that serves as a technical recap for the pro AV community - both for people who could not attend, and for people like me who did, but didn't have anywhere near enough time to see everything. The 2025 report is out now and the good news is that it is a free download - a departure for a company that produces detailed reports that are typically paywalled and tend to cost at least four figures. In this podcast, I chat with Ted Romanowitz, a principal consultant focused mainly on LED, and Morris (or Mozz) Garrard, who heads the pro displays file and looks more at LCD and OLED. We get into a bunch of things in a too-short 30 minute interview. You'll hear about mass-transferred Chip On Board tech. Where Chip On Glass, also known as MicroLED, is at. And we also get into LCD, OLED, e-paper and projection. Have a listen. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Ted and Morris, thank you for joining me. You guys are from Futuresource Consulting.  Every big trade show, like an ISE or an Infocomm and some other ones as well, but those are the ones I'm most familiar with, Futuresource sends a whole bunch of people to these shows. I'm curious how many people at Futuresource are on the pro display file, and why do you go to trade shows like ISE?  Morris Garrard: Dave, I'm glad to jump in. Thank you again for your time today, and looking forward to tossing with you. Overall, we took nearly 20 analysts and business development people to ISE which shows Futuresource's commitment to the trade show and our clients, specifically the Pro AV, we took four analysts, and I'm on the consulting and advisory side, so we had a really good representation across all the technologies: projection, flat panel, interactive, and LED.  I assume the reason that you go is it's a very efficient way to see a whole bunch of new stuff and touch base with a whole bunch of companies under one roof in a matter of days. Morris Garrard: Oh, absolutely. For me, it's just always, you walk in and you hit that Hall 3 where a lot of the display companies are, and it's just. Like that first impression you go, oh my gosh, here we are. How am I gonna do all this?  It's always nice. I always start at the Lang booth because they always do a nice job of having that big wow something right there at the major intersection. Yeah, they've done well with that. One thing about Futuresource is that the great majority of the material you put out is understandably paywalled. That's your business, you're producing subject matter expertise reports and selling them. So I'm always a bit curious about a complete 180 with these post-show reports. They're very detailed, there are many pages, and it's almost boy, that's more than you needed to do. Morris Garrard: Yes, I think it's, this year was something between 40 and 50 pages to cover the many, different areas of our practices, but, yeah, we think it adds value to our clients to see the latest and greatest, what's happening and not just a reporting of this product announcement or that product announcement, but it provides the context of what's really happening the undercurrents and the, big stories, the technology transitions, if you will, that are happening that are driving shifts in the industry. That kind of helps us open doors with clients to have deeper Engagements with them based on our unique insights.  Ted Romanowitz: I think just to add to that as well is we don't produce these show reports solely for the benefit of our clients. We also work with an extensive research network that benefits from these show reports, as well as other industry bodies that we work with, like trade associations, for example, and our channel partners as well.  It's a way, obviously, that you're getting driving awareness of the sort of work that you guys do and what is possible behind the paywall.  Ted Romanowitz: Exactly that. Yeah. It's a brilliant opportunity to raise our profile and also to raise the profile of the analysts working within these product sectors as well. So we're already four minutes in, and I've got about half an hour to chat with you guys. So we should dive straight into some of what you saw and came away with, and I would say that the biggest thing is probably LED in the context of pro display, anyway. So let's skip past audio and some of those other areas. You talked a lot in the report about mass transfer chips on board. Can you, first of all, describe what that is? Because we're in an industry that's overwhelmed by acronyms and why they're important, and what's the distinction? Why are you saying mass transferred when you're processing COB with mass transferred? Ted Romanowitz: Yes, and not only are there a lot of acronyms, Dave, but the problem is that terms are being misused, and I've heard you talk about that a little bit. It's a really strategic inflection point that's happening right now, literally right in front of our very eyes at ISE, where you're shifting from packaged LED technologies that have driven the industry for 20 years where the LED: red, blue, green are packaged and then picked and placed onto a PCB. That's shifting to package list technologies where the individual chiplets are red, blue, and green and are being mass transferred. So instead of one pixel at a time, they're doing thousands, and when you think about it in context, a 4k display is over 8.2 million pixels. So if you can transfer thousands at a once instead of one by one, you save a lot of time, and so this package list technology is like a chip on board where the backplane is a PCB and it's a passive driver and then chip on glass or what we call micro LED. Truly micro LED, that is, sub-100 micrometers mass transferred onto a TFT black backplane with an active driver. So at ISE, you saw this crazy tidal wave, I'm going to go with that term, this crazy tidal wave of companies that are announcing COB, and the biggest thing is that they're coming to the fruition of manufacturing processes so that they can mass transfer instead of pick and place. So the cost is going to be a lot less to make them, first of all, because you don't have to package first, then pick and place, and then secondly, because you can mass transfer.  So we expect, and this is going to, within maybe the next 12 months following, this could drive up to a 50 percent decrease in the ASPs, average sales price of 1.5 millimeters and below. It's just truly amazing. We've been hearing about this for several years, Futuresource has been writing about it, and now it's happening right before our eyes.  With COB, there are other inherent advantages as well, right? The first one would be that as they're manufactured, the finished modules have some sort of protective coating on them. That's just fundamental to how they do them, right? Versus SMD, it's the older school packaged LED displays where they're unprotected unless they've got this glue on board coating, and they're more prone to damage.  Ted Romanowitz: Yes, exactly, and those processes have been perfected over the last two to three years. So not only can you do a nice job of encapsulating it, but they can repair the LEDs as well, even after encapsulation.  So that's a major thing that's happening, and one of the things that I saw at the show was i5LED actually had a double difficult display that they did in the sense that it's a corner, an inside corner, which is difficult to do with LEDs to get, so there's not any seams or anything. But then the second thing they did is they put a touch overlay on an encapsulated COB display so you could touch. It had multi-touch on it. So again, really interesting to see the future of what's happening.  Yeah, because touch and LED were different worlds for the longest time, and it's only been recently where you start to see IR frames around displays that would make them interactive, and you wouldn't want to touch a conventional SMB display because it was going to damage it.  Ted Romanowitz: Exactly, especially when you get to 1.2 millimeters and below. The joke has always been that you needed to put a little tray underneath the LED wall that you were touching to capture all of the LED pixels that were falling off. But now, that's improved with all these new manufacturing techniques.  Are there benefits as well to COB in terms of energy consumption or brightness, things like that? Ted Romanowitz: Yeah, and the answer is yes. It's really incredible to see. Early in the LED market, if you've got 600 nits that was a lot, now you're seeing indoor displays at a 1000 or 1500 nits, which allows you to put them in a high ambient light situation, room that has Florida ceiling windows, like an office or an atrium, or even in a store window or of course outdoors in a kind of a kiosk or a standalone LED display. So this package is like technology; the chips are getting so small that you're filling in the space between the chips with an ultra black covering. That increases the contrast ratio and makes HDR content sing.  Yeah, it's like the old days of plasma displays and how their big benefit was deep blacks.  Ted Romanowitz: Exactly.  Yeah, so one of the things I came away with from ISE, and I had the impression in earlier shows as well, but really amplified this year with all the talk around micro LED and how it's coming, and that's like the ultimate super premium display.  I would look at the current product line of manufacturers who are doing COB and think, okay, that's more than good enough. I don't know that the world needs to get to micro LED video walls for us to finally have good-looking LED video walls. We're already there.  Ted Romanowitz: That's true, but really, it comes down to a cost basis, and this is where we've modeled. Working with some of the biggest OEMs and ODMs in the world, we've modeled the volume that they're going to be able to produce over the next several years, and the quality that they'll be able to deliver in mass quantities, and basically, the outcome is that by the early 2030s, let's say a 77-inch or 80-inch micro LED display chip on glass will be $4,000 or less and so that brings it into mass adoption and really makes it useful for, not only does it enable the close up viewing that chip on glass does, or chip on board, but it enables a price point where you're going to see it broadly deployed in meeting rooms and corporate, you'll see it in classrooms and education, all across stadiums, venues, hospitality, every different market vertical is going to be impacted by a price point of LED that's comparable to LCD today within the next several years.  Why wouldn't that happen just with COB?  Ted Romanowitz: It's the cost basis of being able to do things on a PCB is more expensive versus a TFT backplane. Over the long run, it has to shift towards a TFT backplane, a glass backplane.  The barrier to that happening right now is unlike COB, where mass transfer appears to have been worked out. It's still a work in progress on the chip on the glass or micro LED side, right? Ted Romanowitz: It is. There are a few other roadblocks that have to be overcome for chip on glass to be in volume with high quality, high yields, and when that happens, then you'll start seeing the volume ramp and the price really starts to drop.  So there will be a day, early in the next decade, when chip-on-glass micro LED displays have the same dimensions, same resolution, everything else would be at price parity with LCD. Ted Romanowitz: Yes, with LCD today. What Moss has been looking at with the rest of the team is what's gonna happen with flat panel LCD, interactive LCD, and projection. What are the unique instances where those need to be implemented, best-fit applications and what they're doing to drive price down and add value, differentiate to keep extending those product life cycles. Moss, is there much runway still for LCD? I'm also very curious about OLED, which keeps getting better technically but is still pretty narrowly defined, particularly on the pro-AV side.  Morris Garrard: Yeah. I think there are a few nuances here that we need to consider when we're talking about the LCD product lifecycle.  How we looked at this in our recent strategic market outlook was to split the market into three parts. So first, looking at the video will market, then looking at the digital signage market, and then looking at what we define as the presentation market, so in front of classroom, front of boardroom devices. Video wall, I think it's no real surprise that it is certainly being cannibalized by LED the fastest. We're already seeing that kind of impact happening at, I think, back in 2020; even LED overtook LCD as the main contributor to market value in the video wall market. If we then look at digital signage, which obviously would include screens that are sub 100 inch, which typically would have the price per resolution advantage over LED. We're already seeing LED making inroads to that market as well, so it's actually in 2025 that we're expecting LED to overtake LCD as the main contributor to the market value. Then, looking at the presentation market, which is very much dominated by the likes of interactive flat panel display, but then also obviously nontouching in many boardrooms as well. Obviously, there is still that cost consciousness when it comes to presentation displays. However, in the more narrow pixel pitch segments, as Ted mentioned, that price attrition that we're expecting over the next few years, it's going to rapidly increase the adoption of LEDs within the boardroom, especially the boardroom, and perhaps less so in K12, which obviously makes up the bulk of the education segment. But we're expecting by 2028 that LED will overtake LCDs and market value share by that point. That's not to say necessarily that the LCD market is going away in volume terms. I think the key point is in terms of value. Prices are continuing to erode to really race to the bottom on LCD. And then obviously, yeah, with volume starting to flatten out, LED is making inroads quite rapidly.  What about OLED? Morris Garrard: OLED's an interesting one. I think the key stumbling block for OLED in the professional displays market has been the price, as opposed to LCD. We're looking at around about 1.5 to 2X differential, which within the cost conscious mindset, especially in signage, but also in presentation displays as well. It has presented an obstacle to adoption. So OLED, we're looking at around 1% of volumes across the global market in terms of volume, and really that's stayed quite stable over the last few years, hasn't ramped as perhaps was expected a few years ago,  One thing that was intriguing to me was reading some of the stuff coming out of CES and then going to ISE, and I went to the TCL booth, I believe and they had a 120 or 125-inch something, giant TV, and I was thinking, okay, that I know what they're doing with these things. There's local dimming and everything else, and the visuals coming out of these displays are stunning. They look borderline OLED quality and at that form factor, as costs come down on manufacturing those things, they are starting to approach, very close in size to all in LED displays that a lot of manufacturers have in their product lines to simplify things for meeting spaces, conference rooms and so on. Do you see these LCDs getting some traction, supplanting the all-in-one LEDs?  Morris Garrard: Do you know what, Dave? That's a really interesting point because we had a number of conversations at ISE about the opportunity for larger than 100-inch LCDs. I think my answer to those individuals was that there may be an opportunity for now. I think the price attrition that we're seeing on all-in-one LEDs will bring those displays into, maybe not into price parity, then at least, within the same kind of ballpark.  But I think the other key issue with, let's take 120 inch LCD, for example, is the logistics of it. If you're in a boardroom and you're on the fifth floor, and you've got to fit a 120-inch LCD into a lift, then where we're based in Europe, that's absolutely not going to happen. Maybe in North America where you guys have your freight elevators and whatnot, but I think in terms of being able to install the display itself. You're not carrying that on the stairs.  Morris Garrard: Exactly, and let's say someone does crack it on the floor as they're installing it, then you've got to replace the whole thing. Whereas with an LED wall, it's just one module that needs to be replaced. I think there are those challenges as well that will limit the opportunity in that segment.  Are you seeing much innovation when it comes to LCD and OLEDs?  Morris Garrard: I would say in terms of the commercial LCD market, over the last few years, the key points of innovation have been, as you say, OLED initially, 8K resolution, 21:9, and then high brightness and kind of outdoor displays lumped into one. Those have really been the key points of development.  In terms of market adoption, though, they haven't really taken off. I would say high brightness and outdoors are probably the best examples, accounting for around 2 to 4% of market volumes, whereas the rest is still lingering around 1 to 2%. There was a lot of buzz and quite a bit of activity at ISE around electronic ink products, e-paper products, particularly on the color side. They've gotten bigger. There were 75-inch versions there. I had seen them earlier when I was over in Taiwan, and I thought, okay, this is interesting, but it's really early days, and this is a proof of concept more than anything else because yeah, they didn't look bad, but they didn't look good.  Morris Garrard: Yeah, I think e-paper is an interesting one and I think it presents a fantastic opportunity to the pro displays industry as a whole I think there has been a bit of maybe industry confusion around the purpose and the intended use case for e-paper and I think the point that really needs clarifying is that e-paper is not here to replace lcd I think in many ways it's there to complement LCD. Yes, it's there to replace print.  Morris Garrard: It's there to replace print, exactly, and one of the key conversations around that exact point is, would using the 16:9 aspect ratio be the most appropriate? Obviously, for signage customers that are used to digital signage, then yes, but for those end users that are replacing print signage would actually like the A Series, for example, be a more appropriate sizing range to use. I think that this market segment is still figuring some of those things out. But yeah, definitely a lot more, A lot more on on show at ISE this year, which was fantastic to see, and even new brands as well, not only kind of new models from those brands that were already active in the space. As I say, it's the early adopter phase at the moment, but I think certainly a lot of industry potential.  It was interesting, though, because, with all the buzz around it, I don't know that many people because they don't have a reason to be paying that close attention to it. They don't understand that all of these color e-paper displays are coming from one manufacturer, and whether it's Samsung Sharp or Agile Display Solutions, they're remarketing and tweaking E Ink's product. Is there any other manufacturer out there that you've run into that's actually coming up with something that is also color e-paper? I'm aware of some ESL manufacturers who are not using E Ink, but that's monochrome stuff.  Morris Garrard: Yeah, I would say really the pioneer is obviously E Ink. I have seen some Chinese facsimiles, but I would say, generally, the major brands that we work with are working with E INk.  Tearing through stuff here out of necessity, but I wanted to ask about projection.  Morris Garrard: With projection, I think, there is a tendency within the industry to focus on all of the innovation that's happening in LED especially, and thinking that projection is going away silently, but we're still expecting the projection is going to be a very robust component of market value by the end of the decade. We're still looking at a multi-billion-dollar industry by 2029 or 2030.  I would say the conversation within projection has shifted; it's a very mature product segment, of course. We're not really seeing the kind of product revolutions anymore in terms of feature sets or whatnot, the conversation has now shifted more towards the applications for projection. So where can projection be used where other display technologies may not be appropriate? One of the key applications, of course, that's grabbing a lot of headlines is projection mapping, for example, being able to scale an image at a massive scale onto things like historic buildings, for example. You're not going to be doing that with led in, historic cities in Europe, for example, it's just not going to happen. But finding other applications as well, for projection where the other technologies just wouldn't be able to be deployed basically.  When I go to a giant show, like an ISE, I will run into folks like you two and lots of other industry people who've been around for a long time, and we'll always have the conversation of: so,  what did you see that? I need to go see that as well, and I have my own thoughts around that, but I'm curious if there are technologies or particular manufacturers who you came across and thought, “Oh, that's interesting”. Ted Romanowitz: I'll jump in and say, both the chips on board, the wall at Samsung and the LG magnet at their booth looked fantastic, and then you saw chip on glass actually demonstrated in a large format, 136 inch at LG, as a kind of a TV kind of format. Samsung had the transparent micro LED, which I think shows they're starting to evolve their thinking. It's such a cool technology, but I think everyone's struggling with what the killer application for transparent micro LED is just because companies have been struggling with the idea of a transparent OLED. Where does it really fit in? Those are some of the killer things that I saw.  The waterfall at Lang booth. I thought it was incredibly cool, as was the kinetic LED display facing the LG booth. Not practical, but it's cool.  Yeah, and that one, I was impressed by a lot more than previous kinetic LED walls that I've seen because this was more like a game show spinning tile thing where you didn't have all this, very tight synchronizing of modules to make it look good, and I saw another kinetic LED wall I was talking to an old industry friend who said, yeah, this thing's cool, but it's breaking down every half an hour because his stand was right next to it. So it's handled with care.  Ted Romanowitz: Yeah, I thought the other cool part of that kinetic display at LG was the fact that they drew in a social media aspect where you could, upload your picture and they do a little AI magic and all of a sudden you can see Dave Haynes right up there in the middle of the LG kinetic wall. Yes, you could, but I tried that, and it turned me into a guy going through a gender transition, which I'm not quite sure how that happened.  Ted Romanowitz: We love everybody. So that's good. We love you for just who you are, Dave. That's all I'm gonna say about that. It's a side of me I hadn't thought about, but some people said you look good like that. I don't know. Okay, sorry, but it ain't happening.  Moz, how about you?  Morris Garrard: Yeah, we've already touched on it. Compared with the conversations I was having around e-paper at the end of last year, I was amazed to see larger than 32-inch form factors, let alone 75 inches. I think it was at the Dynascan booth. I was just impressed purely with the progress that technology is making in such a short space of time. So yeah, that, for me, was the takeaway.  All right. This has been great. We could have easily spoken for three hours, but we had limited time somehow or other. I appreciate you guys jumping on the phone with me.  Ted Romanowitz: Thanks so much. It's a pleasure, and we're headed over to Taiwan and Korea, so maybe we can talk again and give you some feedback on what we saw at Touch Taiwan with some of the big OEMs and ODMs in Asia.  You gonna have some Soju? Ted Romanowitz: I will definitely have that.  Alright, thanks, guys.  Morris Garrard: Thanks so much, Dave.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT All kinds of people in this industry are very aware that while there is lot of dodgy stuff, there is also lots of well made display technology available from Chinese manufacturers who have zero brand recognition outside of that country. Buy potential buyers don't tend to have the time or resources to make the big flights over the Pacific to visit China and directly source reliable manufacturing partners. And they really - if they're smart - don't want to just order stuff, and then cross their fingers and toes hoping the stuff shows up, lines up with what was ordered, works, and then meets necessary certifications. Jacob Horwitz saw an opportunity to create a new company that functions as something as a boutique digital signage distribution company that sources, curates and markets display and related technologies that its resellers can then take to market. Horwitz will be familiar to a lot of industry people for a pair of installation companies he started and ran the U.S. - IST and later Zutek. In both cases, he sold the companies, and he could have just retired ... but he didn't want to retire. Nor did his wife, because a Jacob with too much time on his hands would make her crazy. So he started Illuminology with a longtime industry friend and business partner Stephen Gottlich, who for many years ran the digital file for Gable. I caught up with Horwitz to talk about the origins and rationale for Illuminology, which is just spinning up but has some big plans. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jacob, it was nice speaking with you. You have started a company called Illuminology, which sounds like you started a cult, but I think that's not what it is.  Jacob Horwitz: Not yet, no, We hope it will be at some point, a good following, but first off, Dave, thanks for having me. It's been nine years since you and I first chatted on a podcast. I don't know if you realize that. It was December of 2016, and we had just finished, I think maybe the nationwide rollout of Burger King, you and I had a chat about that, and it's hard to believe nine years have gone by.  This was when you had IST?  Jacob Horwitz: Installation Service Technologies was a nationwide installation and service company, that was sold in 2018 and then a year later, I restarted a company called Zootech, and I was approached by a customer who was looking to be entrepreneurial and that company is now owned by Karen Salmon. It's a woman-owned business mow, and her father was the founder of Powerpoint of Sale. I took a couple of years off. I have a person that I have worked with for 30 years, my business partner, Stephen Gottlich. I think you've met Stephen, and he has been working with Gable Signs for the last 17 years and I think what Illuminology is now is a culmination of really two parallel journeys. Stephen took a traditional sign company 17 years ago down a path of innovation, and Gable went from a bending metal traditional sign company to a visual solutions company my background, which has been installation and service for the last 20 years, brings together two people who are a little bit older than when you and I first talked nine years ago.  It was probably 60 pounds ago when I talked to you for the first time. I'm a little gray or a little wiser and a little bit older. So the two of us come from really parallel journeys in different areas of digital signage, and we wanted to create something a little different in the United States. We'd seen some business models and other parts of the world that seem to be working. So we wanted to create a marketplace that would expand digital signage to companies interested in expanding their scope of business. So we focus a lot on traditional sign companies other technology-type companies, and installation companies. They all have some type of footprint in the verticals with technology but they're not carrying digital signage.  So we thought, how do we expand digital signage to reach a lot more people? And we've come up with this business model.  So for people who are completely unfamiliar with it, how do you describe it in your elevator pitch? Jacob Horwitz: The easiest way to describe it is to think of us as a traditional distributor of digital signage to authorized resellers. Much like a Blue Star, B&H, except that we're very boutique, and we're very focused, and we're very passionate. Stephen and I are not, we've been fortunate in business. I'm 65, Stephen is 70-ish, so we know we don't have a lot of time to build something that's going to take years and years, but we wanted to build something special.  So you would be like, an Almo or those kinds of companies, but much more focused specifically on digital signage?  Jacob Horwitz: … And being able to support them differently. So take a digital traditional sign company, next month, we'll be at the International Sign Show in Las Vegas, the USA, and a lot of those people are digital, but it's amazing how many fast signs, and banners to go, those types of places that are selling digital signage today and have no idea what digital is. They're very old and traditional.  I think of it if you sold typewriters or telephones a couple of decades ago and you didn't evolve in the IP phones and computers, you're probably not in business anymore. So we're taking a lot of those types of sign companies. We have a course called Illuminology University. We take them through an 8 to 10-week course. These are live training classes and curricula we put together to train them about what is a sign in digital singage, what's LED, what's LCD, what is GOB versus COB, just really teaching them about the industry and they have a lot of reach in the verticals that traditional people selling digital signage today don't have. The other thing that makes us unique. When you go to traditional companies like Blue Stars, you don't have everything available under one distributor. We have an experience center that's opening next week in Kansas City. It's a supermarket of visual solutions, so you'll be able to see not just LED or LCD, but you're also going to see light boxes, you're going to see different kiosks, you're going to see where AI comes into play with digital signage, you're going to have a good understanding in our experience center of the programmatic side of how things can be monetized with a digital retail network. I think that because of the 30 years that Steven and I have been involved in technology and in the last twenty in digital signage, we can be much more of a boutique to help people with a wider range of solutions, not just a traditional 55-inch monitor, but LED posters, you had on your blog a few weeks ago that digital desk, which is part of our showroom, so I think it's about innovation. I think it's about a wider range of solutions, and it's hopefully in our last chapters of life, having a lot of fun with our partners.  So I assume if I call or contact one of the larger distributors who do unified communications, do all kinds of different things, and I start asking them about it, I'm a POS company, I have a customer who's asking me about menu boards and things like that. I don't know where to start.  If you talk to a larger distribution company, they have a sheet or a system that lists all the stuff they have and they can rattle off, here's what we have, what do you want, whereas you're saying because you're much more focused on this area and you have an experience center, people could come in and you can try to find something that's tailored to their needs as opposed to what we have.  Jacob Horwitz: Yeah, I think that all those traditional distribution models are very good at taking orders and taking money. A couple of them even have some departments where they're trying to help you with that consultive part of the business but I think at the end of the day, from my installation side, conservatively, we installed well over 400,000 displays in every kind of vertical you could imagine when I owned IST.  We did the new SoFi Stadium. We did all of their point of sale. Arlington Stadium, we did all of their digital assets when Daktronics had contracted us. And Stephen has done every kind of hardware installs you could think of when he was with Gable. So I think that being able to work with a company and be there to hold their hand too, we've already gotten on a plane and gone to sales calls with our partners. You're not going to get that from a traditional distributor. We work and do the RFPs with them. We work with them on pricing and quotes. So it's a little bit different than just trying to take an order so I think that's what makes us unique and the education and our school of hard knocks, you know, god knows, we've made an awful lot of mistakes in 20 years So I think we're gotten pretty good at what we do.  So are you selling strictly third-party stuff, or are there products that fall under the Illuminology brand or a related brand?  Jacob Horwitz: We've been going back and forth for a decade now to China. Stephen and I's first project together, was Simon Properties, 250 malls, and one of the largest media networks for digital out-of-home in the country, we designed the kiosk 10 years ago that they were still using and running in their malls, and that was a factory direct where we worked directly with the factories, built a kiosk, and were able to give Simon an amazing solution, especially where technology was 10 years ago.  So through that experience and over the last decade, we've met absolutely the best factories in China. There are a lot of stereotypes of what a Chinese factory could look like, and until you go and you see the automation and the technology there, God knows you've done it. You've been all over the world. It's not what a lot of people think. So we work directly with factories. We are creating two brands. There are more later on in the year, we are white labeling or branding our product. There'll be a line of displays called LightScapes, and then there'll be a line of kiosks called EasyOSK. So these are part of our longer-term business plan to have a brand. So you're not just saying, well, we bought these from some factories in Taiwan Korea Vietnam and China. We work very closely with the factories. We work very closely with people like AUO who are on the display side, and the panel side, and we will have some things that are unique within that brand. It will not just be the same product that everybody can buy. But because we're doing factory direct because we've got ten-year relationships with these factories, and they know Stephen and me well. We've been going except during COVID several times a year to China. I think that we're able to buy from them at incredibly good pricing and pass those savings on to our resellers. So what if you had a Chinese manufacturer that's strong domestically in that country and has a lot of them trying to come to the U.S. or over to Europe and say, here we are, and not get anywhere, would you sell their product under their brand or would it have to fall under one of your brands? Jacob Horwitz: No, we sell generic products as well. So for example, that desk that you talk about, I was in that factory last month. The person who owns that factory is a very small equity owner within Illuminology because we've known her for ten years and anything that comes from any factory out of China, she will go do that quality check before it ever hits the container to get over here. So she's a very instrumental part of our business over there, but we sell some of the stuff out of her factory as a generic product. It's not necessarily branded with LightScapes. It might be branded with Illuminology, but when you go look at the certification tags and serial numbers, it's still her company name on it, whereas LightScapes and EasyOSK are true white-labeled products that are going to be unique to us. Does that get around any regulatory issues in terms of what can come over from China if it's coming through you?  Jacob Horwitz: The regulations that are driving everybody in our industry crazy right now are the tariffs. But, to us, I think some of the big things that you don't see out of Chinese companies are the right approvals. We're very focused right now on our products being a UL or UL equivalent. There are five or six laboratories that are like MET. That is exactly like UL. It's UL-approved. We had a very large factory send us apart to test and they looked at it yesterday and we already rejected it because the power supply was not a UL-approved power supply. We said, we're not even going to test it.  So I think that those are things that are not regulatory from the U.S., but they're important to us, from a safety side, especially when you're working with enterprise tier one customers, they, have to have the right certifications, but I think the only thing that's causing us headaches is not the regulatory side, but, trying to figure out the right pricing with tariffs and how we handle that. Cause it's changing by the day.  Jacob Horwitz: Every time I look up, I'm afraid to look at the TV to see if it's higher or whatnot, but all of our pricing that we post to our dealers today is a landed cost from Kansas City. So it's including if we had inbound shipping or we had tariffs, we don't want our resellers to have to worry about that and they know that this is the pricing and if the tariffs go away, then we can lower that price. But if it goes crazy, they need to be prepared. We're working closely with some factories right now in Taiwan, Korea, and others in Vietnam so that we have a backup solution because right now the lion's share is coming from China.  If it's touched in Taiwan or touched in Vietnam, but with Chinese components, does that make a difference? Jacob Horwitz: Yeah, we just had that problem. We had ordered some stuff that came in from Canada, and this was before the Canadian tariff of 25%. This was two-three weeks before that, and we got a bill for tariffs, and we were talking with the U.S. Customs and the experts at DHL and UPS, and it turns out, if you're buying something from, for example, the great area of Canada, where you're sitting at home, but the company we bought it from manufactured their part in China when they ship it to us and their commercial invoice to U.S. Customs asks the company in Canada, where the country of origin it was manufactured and even though I bought it from Canada, had no idea that the part I ordered was not manufactured in Canada, we got hit with that 20 percent tariff on that product, and that surprised us. We didn't think it through or understand and the hard part is even when you talk to the absolute top people at U.S. Customs at the borders that are doing this, they're not even sure hour by hour what the rules are. So it's been hard.  We had another container come in and we had, I think, a $7k or $8k tariff. This is when it was 10%, but it landed in the U.S. before the tariff started and they still would not release it without us paying the tariff. Two days ago, we got that money back from U.S. customs. They realized they shouldn't have even charged it. It was before the date the tariff started. But unfortunately, by the time we released it, they held it hostage for a bit. So it's a hard situation, but we're going to work with other countries and I think that everybody's in the same boat, and I think in terms of pricing, our distribution model is much like the traditional guys. It's on a very low margin. So we have to have a lot of resellers that are looking to expand their business. So I'm curious about markets like Vietnam and India, which I keep hearing about, having gotten into electronics and being alternatives to Korea, Taiwan, particularly China, is that industry, particularly on the display side, mature enough now to buy products from there?  Jacob Horwitz: Since September, I've visited sixteen different countries across the world, I think on three or four continents and getting ready for the right factories and the right things and just enjoying travel at the same time, and the one thing that surprised me is how far behind the U.S. is compared to a lot of parts of the world and how much digital signage you see. Also, when you talk to these people what they're paying for digital signage throughout other parts of the world is far less money than the U.S. customers paying us companies for digital signage. The margins in Asia and Europe are much thinner than the traditional margins that resellers have been getting in the U.S.  Our motto, and you see it across our website, is “The Best for Less”, and we have tried to find the best factories in the world and be able to give it at a price that is not greedy. That's a win for us, for our resellers, and most importantly for the companies that are trying to buy and put that digital signage into their business so they can inspire and tell a story to their customer. And I think that even in the smallest towns of Vietnam, you still see digital outdoor LEDs on the sides of buildings and you go into the shopping malls and it's far more digital than you see here. So that was interesting to me as I've got to travel the world in the last four months. Is it a function of cost or awareness?  Jacob Horwitz: I'm not sure, but I'm assuming first it's a function of cost because where they're working on margins that are so much less, it allows that to get into people's businesses, and when you're charging $1k for a 55-inch commercial grade LCD, 500 nit monitor, it's a barrier to entry. So we're trying to brand something and bring something to the market where we can be 20% less to the end user than a lot of the traditional things, and we think we've accomplished that. The tariffs hurt us a little bit, but they hurt everybody by and large. So I think that's really why the U.S. is slower. I don't want to use the word greed. I own businesses, but people have tried to get margins that I don't think you can get anymore, and I think that you're going to have to find other ways to monetize your business through the installation side, through the content side, and I think that it's also helping companies. It's a big part of what we do. I think of Chris at Stratacash, he has a whole area where he helps monetize their solutions and it's helped, and we're looking at that closely. We're working with three or four companies right now where we can have our resellers work directly with them and educate their end users on how they can monetize the solution, through advertising in certain verticals. Not all verticals are conducive to digital out-of-home, but most are.  So that's an important part of how we're going to help move products into places that normally maybe couldn't afford to put the right solutions in. I assume that there are all kinds of people in North America, the U.S. in particular, who are aware that they can buy stuff via AliExpress or whatever. But they've heard enough to know, yes, you can pay substantially less, but you have to cross your fingers when it shows up.  Is Illuminology positioned as a safe harbor way to do it? Like we're doing the sourcing, we've figured that part out so we could pass on those savings without all the worry. Jacob Horwitz: Look to me, those sites are a lot like a box of chocolates. You never really know what you're going to get when that product shows up. As I said, even with the sample we got from somebody yesterday not being the right display, UL, and approvals, we're not going to be a website where you can buy whatever you want. It's going to be very focused on innovation. It's going to be the same factories. As I'm sure you've seen I get if I get one I get at least three emails every day from some Chinese factory trying to sell you whatever and everyone is a nickel cheaper than the other and I think that's just Pennywise and quality foolish.  So we're not going to be that it's going to be the best for less, and if we can create this supermarket of visual solutions, and it's a great product and the pricing can hit the street to an end user, double-digit, less expensive, and we are distributing through companies that have reached where the traditional resellers aren't touching, then we think that will help expand digital signage across the U.S.  So these would be reached to like the sign companies you mentioned, maybe the point of sale technology companies, those kinds of companies?  Jacob Horwitz: I have a guy I talked to a couple of days ago who sells medical devices. Nothing to do with digital signage. He's out there every day selling blood pressure machines or whatever medical devices he's selling and in the last few days, I've probably talked three times to him now about the opportunity he has to do stuff in the medical world because he's already out there calling on places to put in screens and some LED posters. And, so I think it's all kinds of places that maybe haven't even thought about incorporating digital signage into their end-user business, and these people are now educating why being able to tell a story through digital is so much better than a static sign.  So yeah, it's been enlightening to see all the different verticals you can all of a sudden make inroads that you never thought about. Yeah. So many companies are just going down the same familiar path of chasing QSRs, chasing retail, and I've always advised people to look at those other kinds of companies that already have established trust with your target vertical who supply other things to them and partner with them. Jacob Horwitz: Yeah, it's been interesting. When I was doing the installation side, we did a lot of QSR, McDonald's, Burger King, Sonic, Del Taco, that type of stuff, and a lot of them have seen a few of the first initial posts we've done and they're calling and asking more of what we can do and I'm excited just about window technology whether that be an LED, a double-sided LCD hanging in the window of a fast food restaurant is so much more effective than printing two breakfast sandwiches for $5 and shipping it out to the store, hoping the manager puts it in the window during the promotional time. Half the time, three weeks after the motions are over, they still have that digital thing in there saying breakfast sandwiches or the static poster thing, and then at 10:30 when breakfast is over, they're still talking about breakfast sandwiches instead of talking about Value meals or other desserts or other things they could be buying during dinner. So it makes nothing but sense to have those assets in there.  But the people who are buying their outdoor digital menu board don't even offer that product. So we feel that a supermarket with a full set of solutions, in a C-store to be able to do a stretch screen and a gondola and still do their monitors over their register and doing their digital menu board and having things that inspire people to walk in from the pump into the C-store, we have that full range of product where a lot of people just don't have a full range of offerings to that.  When you say a full range of products, is it purely display technology, or does your supermarket have other things?  Jacob Horwitz: We do light boxes, which are just an aluminum extruded frame that hangs on a wall with backlit LED, but it's a fabric, you see them in every airport. So we do a lot of light boxes, and that's a very affordable and very effective solution. It's a static display, but it pops.  We are doing music. We have partnered with CloudCover. CloudCover is owned by SiriusXM, I believe, and Pandora, because we think that it's part of the whole experience, it's touching all the senses of when you go into that business, we think music is a really important part of branding your business. So there are several out there that are there. We've hitched our ride there on the software side. Because we have to support the dealers, we have, we offer two software platforms, and it's because of relationship and stability and they're the best. There's a saying, if you're the smartest guy in the room, you're in the wrong room and so we've partnered with people that make me where I am not even close to the smartest guy in the room. We love working with Navori. We think Jeffrey Weitzman is amazing. So we offer to our partners and we've worked aggressively to have a good distribution model in Navori to our partners and potential end users. So if I'm sitting in a room with Jeff Hastings, I'm not the smartest guy in the room anymore. So we offer BrightSign, and BrightAuthor, and the players we go with are either the Navori or the BrightSign players, and we offer that CMS. They're not. The cheapest CMS, you had a great interview with Alistair and what they're doing and I listened to you last night. So there are a lot of options, but we have to support the dealer network. So to be able to have a dealer that wants to go off and do a different CMS, we support that. They can send us software and we'll test it to make sure, particularly if it's going to be SOC, that what they're using is going to run properly on that version of Android. So we'll support them that way or just before we order the product, we'll go into our lab and throw that on, but we can't support that dealer network on how to use the CMS. We have BrightAuthor and Novori, and we're good, and then we have two full-time people thatwho NOVA certified. So on the LED side, we're no, we have NOVA-certified experts, so we can help them with Novastar. So we can support that, but we can't support every CMS. So we encourage them, especially if they need a 4-a-month CMS, then I think that Alistair is a great solution, and there are a lot of those types of companies out there. But that won't be us. We'll have a couple of CMS, we'll have the music solution and we hope we can create a visual experience and a sensory experience that when they walk into an end user that's bought a product through one of our resellers, that product's inspiring consumers to spend more money. You and Stephen are hands-on with this, but how many other people do you have working with you?  Jacob Horwitz: Oh gosh, I've tapped into a lot of my old employees in a lot of years, so Stephen and I have known each other for 30 years. For us, it's more passionate at this age. It's certainly not about really the money. This is because your wife said you need to do something.  Jacob Horwitz: After years of being in the house and driving her crazy every 10 minutes, she made it clear I will either go find a job, or I'll have to support her next husband. So that had a little bit to do with it. But Stephen and I are wired the same way. It's about quality. It's about good solutions. It's never been about trying to make money on this. I think it's helping people. The people that I've brought in, I have a Project Manager who worked for me starting 15 years ago, and now she's ahead of our marketing, Becca, and she's been with me for a decade and a half. The girl in my accounting department has been with me for over 15 years. I have a fragment in the house Legal who is my full-time in my old business and they've all been around at least 10 or 15 years. My CIO has been with me since 1999. So he was in college when he started. So we've got a good, like Stephen and I, that these are not newbies to this industry. One of my Project Managers started with me when we first talked nine years ago when she was a Senior Project Manager for Burger King. So, everybody that I've surrounded myself with so far, there's been at least a decade of hitting the shows, doing the installs, and that school of hard knocks. So have you got 20 people, 40 people? Jacob Horwitz: Right now, we're a team of maybe ten or eleven people. I have three people coming in next week for interviews after the experience center is open that are all industry veteran types and we're just getting started. The idea started in September. I went to Infocomm and then maybe I saw you and just started feeling the waters. We were going to launch in early January or February. We're a month old. The container of our showroom sat in Long Beach for six weeks before it got. It took longer to get from Long Beach to our offices than it did from China to Long Beach. So we're just getting started. But we're going to stay in a boutique. We don't want to be all things to all people.  Right, and they can find you online at Illuminology.com?  Jacob Horwitz: Illuminology.com and there's an online brochure of the product and we thank you. And Dave, I said this to you the other day, but I want to say it again. I need to thank you because, for everybody I've ever hired for the last decade, the first thing we have them do is go through your podcast and your blogs and learn about the industry, and what you do for us is so valuable and I mean that with all sincerity.  Thank you.  Jacob Horwitz: We hired a new sales guy and he started a month ago. He called me yesterday and said, Do you know this Dave Haynes guy? He didn't know, he did not know I had a podcast today. He goes, I am learning so much from him. And, I go, yeah, I'm chatting with him tomorrow. So thank you for what you do as well.  Thank you. That's very kind.  Jacob Horwitz: Very well deserved. So thank you for the opportunity to share our story and we look forward to working with the people in the industry, to help and expand digital signage into places that can be more like your Europe where it's everywhere. All right. Thank you!

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The work on the big Future Displays report and then ISE kind of threw me off my weekly podcast routine, but we're back now - with a couple of interviews recorded, and more that are scheduled. First up is Alastair Taft, a software developer based in Hobart, Tasmania - which for the map-impaired is a big island off the southeast coast of Australia. During COVID, he and another developer came up with a plan to use the windows of shuttered retail as projected surfaces for ads and other messaging. That business didn't really go anywhere, but the exercise led to them having a solid software stack to play out and manage media - which led to the commercialization and launch of Luna Screens. The company goes to market with this key, minimalist assertion: Really Simple Digital Signage Software. It's also, at less than $4 a month per device on subscriptions, really inexpensive. I chatted with Taft about what makes his platform genuinely simple, and how being lean and mean - and making the software bulletproof - makes Luna Screen's business approach workable. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Alastair, thank you for joining me. Can you tell listeners what Luna Screens is all about, when it was launched, and the background?  Alastair Taft: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on. So we've been building Luna Screens for probably quite a while, probably about the last four years or so, but we only really started selling it about a year ago and what it is a really simple digital signage platform, that sums it up.  Why did you do this and why four years ago? You mentioned “we” so I assume there are other people involved. What was the thinking behind doing this?  Alastair Taft: Originally, it was a couple of us building it, a very small team. And originally it was something different, back during that great time around 2020.  We had this crazy idea where there was lots of closed down shops and shopping centers and if you walk through any of them they were dead and it didn't look too good, so we had this crazy idea where we would set up projectors in all these shops and put this photographic film on the windows project, either artwork or advertising, so we built all this software to do all that and it didn't go anywhere. It turns out we've actually built a pretty good digital signage solution here, so let's pivot a little bit. In reality, what we have now is a complete rewrite. It wasn't that much of an overlap, but that's how we ended up here.  You're a software developer by trade? Alastair Taft: Yeah, I've built quite a few things, mainly working for startups. So I've got quite a lot of experience building tech, getting lots of startups off the ground.  Yeah. I think I saw on your LinkedIn page that you're a full stack JavaScript developer, which I know what that means, but not totally. Alastair Taft: Yeah. It's just basically front end, back end, and everything involved in JavaScript. It's pretty ubiquitous.  You're in Tasmania, and it's only 7 in the morning there, so you're given a pass on being too fluid with your talking; you haven't had your coffee yet. Alastair Taft: That's true.  When you say it's really simple, I know what simple means, but how do you define that? Because there's any number of digital signage software, CMS platforms out there who insist that they're relentlessly intuitive, easy to use, all those kinds of terms. What is it about yours that validates that assertion?  Alastair Taft: I know this is probably what a lot of other platforms say too. We do think we are intuitive. When we say simple, that doesn't mean unsophisticated. But if you go on CMS and try it out, it is very simple. There are two things there. There's your screens and then there's your media library, and that's the only two things you have there. So you aren't overloaded with a million different configuration options. It's something you can get up and running quickly. There is a lot you can do, but that's the basic building blocks you get on there, you've got your screens and you've got your media library. And then there's way more powerful things you can do with your different media, with scheduling and playlists and all sorts, but that's the bare bones.  The yardstick for sort of industrial grade, enterprise grade platforms is scalability that, yes, it can be easy to use, but yes, we can also scale and we have the elasticity, we have the data behind it and everything else to be able to very efficiently, schedule it to a whole bunch of screens. Are you there with that, or are you more focused on the small to medium business market?  Alastair Taft: We are very scalable. I have a lot of experience building software that scales. For example, I've done some work for one of the largest supermarkets here in the past, and we've rolled out this personalized video that went out to half the country, so we can handle scaling with a software.  Market that tends to be small to medium size businesses, but that doesn't mean we can't handle hundreds of screens. What we can do is if you want to roll out the same content to hundreds of screens, you can create what we call a Playlist, and on the Playlist, you can either have it looping content. You could have one item if you wanted to, or you could have very complex rules that you layer. If you have some certain thing you want to show on a certain date, or you want to show some out of hours or business hours content, then what you can do is set your screens to play this Playlist, and then every time you change that Playlist, it will deploy it to all your screens automatically.  So when you were developing this, did you and your coding partner at that time put any time into looking at what other platforms did and how they were presented and the overall functionality, or did you just pretty much say, okay, this is the task, let's write something that addresses the task. Alastair Taft: Yeah, we did look at a bit of other platforms at the time. What we found is there's quite a lot of clunky tech out there. A lot of the CMSs just seem quite clunky to use. I know there are a couple that are quite good that are out now, but not when we started. How do you define clunky? What is it that you found clunky?  Alastair Taft: Oh, you just have this feeling when you use it, like you press a button and you have to wait like a year before it does anything, I think, or, you look under the hood and it's pulling in about a thousand different dependencies and yeah, it's not nice to use really. Yeah, it's one thing that I've spoken about a few times with people when they asked me about software platforms, and I said these days, if you are still releasing version 8 on the same software stack that you've been supporting for 15-20 years, I think that's troublesome, versus companies that are relentlessly modern and using whatever tool sets are available right now that can optimize what's possible. Alastair Taft: Yeah, for sure. It's a fast-moving place, front-end development. So you have to keep up to date all the time.  When you hear from customers, what's the impression you get from them in terms of what they want, and how does this meet it?  Alastair Taft: So we hear a lot of positive things from customers about how easy it is to use. We have quite a few coming over from other platforms saying, “Oh, we really like this. It's a joy to schedule content.”  Is that the big ask, just the ease of use?  Alastair Taft: For our customers, I think they find we're probably quite affordable compared to other CMSs as well, which I'm sure helps.  Yeah, you're a software as a service, right?  Alastair Taft: Yeah.  If I'm remembering correctly, your pricing was USD 3.75 a month per screen. Is that really per edge device?  Alastair Taft: That's right. Yeah. Per screen at $3.75, which I think is correct, but it makes us very competitive. I think there's only one other CMS that is that price.  The counter, not argument, but the question would be, okay, how do you make money at that?  Alastair Taft: We don't have all the bells and whistles like monitoring. Our focus is on a really simple platform to use for scheduling content and a reliable player and we're focusing on Android at the moment. So if that's what you need to do, we're a great option.  Android player, what flavor? I'm looking at the website and the minimum version is Android 7, and you're saying any Android media player or any device like I've heard through the years companies say, okay, now we have our own media player because we want to get away from trying to support all these rogues gallery of different players out there, everything from really good stuff to junk that costs $49. Alastair Taft: It's certainly a challenge supporting the different versions of Android. So it's a very hard thing to do, and we've solved a lot of things we've come across. But that is our goal. We want to support consumers' Android devices, and there's a lot of, I don't want to say tricks, but there's a lot of things you can do that we have to do to make them work reliably. You're also on the Google Play store. So, is that for Chrome OS?  Alastair Taft: No, it's for Android devices.  Oh, okay. So it's just how you would get the player.  Alastair Taft: Yeah, or you can either install via the Chrome Store or the Amazon app store, or you can download our APK off our website and install directly. You're on Fire Sticks as well? Alastair Taft: That's right.  Is that the official digital signage Fire Stick or the older ones?  Alastair Taft: I believe we're not part of the software that comes pre-installed, and you can't get the official signage Fire Sticks over in Australia yet, but I imagine we're on there if you search for us.    Again, your market, in many respects, are people who can't invest a lot of time and don't want to invest a lot of money in digital signage. So they want something affordable. It's not a big cost month to month, not a big cost front end, and it's gotta be dead simple so that they can sit down for half an hour or whatever it is a week to do things. Alastair Taft: Yeah, pretty much. I want something reliable. Like you said, I don't want to worry about it too much. Get something up and running. I don't have to think about it too much. Easy to use. That's where we sit.  You mentioned you don't have device management. Is that something that's nullified if you have a stable software stack, to worry around having device management?  Alastair Taft: Yeah, that's what we're going for. So you plug it in, it auto boots when you turn your device on, and it just keeps running. It's really simple, and it's a conscious choice. The more stuff we try and do, the more things that can go wrong. So we try to build a really simple solution that's just gonna stay up.  What would be a typical customer? Like, how would you describe them?  Alastair Taft: So I suppose the only correlation we have is the small to medium businesses, mainly the people that come to us. But we've got quite a few that kind of use it for their menus in their food shops, the menu boards, we've got quite a few that use this for that. There's no kind of one industry that we're gravitating to. We've got corporate environments. We've got builders, merchants, and adventure playgrounds using us - no correlation, really.  How are they all finding you?  Alastair Taft: Some people find us just through organic search. We do now and again run a few ads, and that's it, really, at the moment. We've got some other ideas in the works, but we haven't done them yet.  So it's all inbound. Do you have any outbound sales efforts?  Alastair Taft: No, we're very laid back, really, don't like the hard sales tactics for call people and harassing them. So we don't do anything like that with our pricing either. It's all very simple and straightforward.  Yeah. You're a software developer first, so having to do the sales and management side of this, I'm sure, is not your favorite part of the day.  Alastair Taft: Not really. I like being in the weeds with the tech. How do you manage, how do you balance that?  Alastair Taft: Yeah, it's a struggle. I keep it about 50-50. 50% on tech business and 50% on business development.  Is this the only thing you're working on, or are you still doing work for startups?  Alastair Taft: Mainly, this is the thing I work on. There's the occasional startup I help out on, but this is primarily my full-time job. I have the sense that as a software developer, if you love this side of what you do, you don't do version one and then just leave it. I suspect you're constantly iterating.  Alastair Taft: Yeah, improvements are being rolled out all the time. You'll never notice them because they apply automatically, but we're very careful about testing before we roll anything out, but there are always improvements happening.  Is it based on what you're seeing, or are you getting feedback from customers saying, Hey, it would be great if, if we could do this? Alastair Taft: Yeah, we get feedback all the time asking for X, Y, and Z. We can't do it all, but we collate and use it as a kind of indicator of where to go next. But we're always working on the core underlying thing. So there might not be a feature all the time, but we're making the tech reliable and doing as much as we can to squeeze everything we can out of our player. What about the security side?  Alastair Taft: So, for the accounts, we do something a little bit differently. We never ask for passwords. You log in for a magic link that gets sent to your email, so your email is the login. I think more and more people are doing that, but that means we don't ever store anybody's passwords, which I think is better and a screen can only access its content, and it has its kind of authentication that you set up when you pair it, and that all happens automatically.  I suspect that most of your client base are small businesses and some companies, workplaces, and so on, who maybe aren't thinking as much about security anyways, or are they like a larger company where they are concerned about it? Alastair Taft: I suppose the small businesses aren't really thinking about it, but we do everything to protect them. So yeah, screens can only access their own content, and the only way you can get into the account is via email. So everything's pretty secure there.  Is it always evident that you're using Luna screens, or do you have any partners who are white labeling your solution? Alastair Taft: So we don't advertise any of the white labeling options or any enterprise options, but we do have a couple of customers that do that. But predominantly, no, we don't white label, but it's something we can do.  There's been a lot of talk for several years now about the importance of APIs and how you need to be able to intermingle and work with other systems within a business. Are you doing that?  Alastair Taft: So we have a pretty easy-to-use API under the hood, but we haven't made it available to the public. It's something we probably will do in the future, but right now, the focus is on a reliable Android player and a really simple CMS.  Going back to the hardware, when Android first started being used for digital science media players, probably going back a dozen years, perhaps even longer. There were some good boxes. There were a lot of terrible boxes.  One of the biggest challenges with them was that they were moving targets in terms of the build and the electronics that were inside the little plastic shell. Is it better now? More stable?  Alastair Taft: There are some really good devices out there. For example, I've looked at the specs of the Amazon signage stick, and I've got comparable devices that I tested on myself and they work really well. So when we started, we were testing on the underpowered Fire Sticks because we figured if we can get it working on that, we can get it working on anything, and yeah, there is a big difference between devices depending on what specs you have.  So, for example, with the underpowered Fire Stick, you wouldn't want to be running 4k video on it. It wouldn't perform so well. So you do have to get a decent box for what you want to do, but if you just want a slideshow of images, it'd probably be fine, right?  When you get new customers and they say, “Hey, this is great. We want to go; we're looking at your screen, and it says you support Android. What do we buy?”  Do you give them recommendations on different devices that are reliable?  Alastair Taft: Yeah. So we were recommending it because we want to run on consumer stuff, and we were recommending using the Chromecast because it's not too expensive, and it's a pretty good piece of hardware, but that's now been discontinued, I believe, so like you said, we probably will shortly offer our own box just as an option. So people can get something that's going to work well without having to think about it too much.  Amazon signage sticks and all those devices, I believe pretty much all of them come from China and you can find some good boxes if you know what you're looking for on the Chinese websites like AliExpress and Alibaba. They are the same ones that Amazon orders anyway, except they're not as expensive, even though they're pretty cheap as they are anyway.  I'm curious about the state of software development when it comes to AI and I keep reading stories about software as a service platform being at risk because Agentic AI, the idea that you can just get AI to write an agent that's going to do everything you need it to do, is going to take the place of a lot of, particularly the more expensive, like CRM systems and all that sort of thing if you can get AI to just write something that serves your needs. Do you see that as a threat? Is that more just people prognosticating as opposed to having a real good sense of what's possible?  Alastair Taft: So I might differ in opinion to what a lot of other people will say here, but no, I'm not worried. If you ever see what code AI can produce, it'll create you more problems than it will solve and if you, imagine roughly how it works, the AI creates the next likely code in the sequence. So if you're writing some code, AI will figure out what you're the next based off, breaking it down to tokens, and figure out what the next piece of code is to write. It's been trained on everything available on the internet.  So if you want to create something mediocre, use AI because it will be the average of what else is out there.  Whatever you think of it, It's come a long way in about a year and a half in terms of capabilities. Do you see a point when it will get good, or does it just have fundamental limitations?  Alastair Taft: I think we're hitting the limit because how it works is that it creates the next token in the sequence, and it'll have a matrix of, possible combinations, but every time you add like a new dimension to that matrix, you're exponentially making the computation bigger and bigger, so at some point, there's just no way this can get any better.  So in terms of Luna screens, what's the size of your footprint? Are you in like thousands working with thousands of devices, hundreds of devices? You've only been at it for a year.  Alastair Taft: So yeah, we're pretty small. Our customers are probably in the hundreds, we've probably got around a thousand screens we manage. So, yeah, early days, but we're going in the right direction, growing every day. So that's a good sign.  Is most of that business now in Australia?  Alastair Taft: No, it's all around the world. There's no one country that seems to gravitate, we've got quite a few customers in the US, quite a few in Canada, lots in Europe, quite a few in Australia too.  Does it present a problem at all in terms of customer support or everything's email and if you write it correctly, you don't have a lot of support issues? Alastair Taft:  That's the plan. If an issue comes up, we provide help straight away, and we look at how we can make this happen again. Okay. So the support effort is generally quite low, which is, I think, good. It's a measure that our customers aren't hitting issues, which I think is good. Yeah, you don't want a 40-person call center that gets expensive.  You're down in Tasmania and Hobart, not a part of the world I've ever been in, and I understand it's beautiful. Is there much of a tech scene down there?  Alastair Taft: It's got some quiet achievers down here. There's a company called Procreate that makes this awesome software for tablets for artists to do drawing and they, you don't hear much about them down here, but they're huge. They're all over the world. So yeah, there are some quiet achievers down here.  And you've always been down in Tasmania? Alastair Taft: I'm originally from the UK, I came here about 10 years ago. Oh, that's a big change.  Alastair Taft: Yeah. Although if I could go anywhere, this is probably the most English Australian place I could have gone to. The weather's the same. They drive on the same side of the road.  The weather's the same?  Alastair Taft: Pretty much, yeah. When you think of Australia, you think of it as really hot, but Tasmania is the furthest south you can go. Yeah, you're as close as you're going to get to Antarctica, right?  Alastair Taft: Yeah, but it's not cold, it's very similar to English weather.  Oh, I didn't realize that. Was that an unfortunate discovery?  Alastair Taft: Yeah, I landed up here by chance cause I was coming here for work, but, if I had a choice, probably should have gone somewhere a bit sunnier. Yeah, it could have been in Queensland or something like that.  Alastair Taft: Yeah. Although not at the moment, they've got a cyclone there, but yes.  True. Alright, Alastair. Thank you. That was terrific. Very interesting to hear about your company.  Alastair Taft: Great. Thanks for having me on. Great to chat. 

Countless companies have tried sticking a screen above things in public spaces, thinking - or more appropriately hoping - that the scenario and dynamics were something that would interest brand advertisers. I won't say it never worked, but there's a lot of roadkill. A company out of Vancouver, on Canada's west coast, is going at this notion - but in a very different way. Intuitive puts 43-inch displays just to the rear of trash stations in busy public and private spaces. But instead of just running booked ad campaigns, the main purpose of the screens and supporting AI-driven tech is to change consumer behaviors. A computer vision camera uses AI-based pattern detection to look at the trash someone is about to drop into receptacles, and tells them what goes where. We've probably all had a last sip of a coffee-to-go, stopped to drop ti in the trash and recycling station, and then stood there wondering which bins to drop things in. The company, whose founders have roots in robotics, had quite a bit of success selling ready-to-go systems to organizations. on the basis that teaching consumers to correctly sort their trash would save a lot of back-end labor and time. But customers were buying one or two systems for big venues, because that's what budgets would allow. Even though 10 or 20 were needed. Based on a lot of real-world experience and enthusiasm from brands, Intuitive has now pivoted to a more traditional place-based digital media model. The business has blown up, with 10s of 1,000s of installs under contract, including a big partnership with Pepsico. I had a great chat with co-founder and CEO Hassan Murad, who calls himself the company's chief trash talker. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Hassan, thank you for coming on my podcast. I was at Digital Signage Experience a few weeks ago and wandered around the trade show floor. It wasn't all that big or crowded with stands, but I saw the stand for your company and kind of went right on by because I have this attitude based on years of seeing companies trying to put advertising screens atop damn near anything.  But I was compelled by a business friend to have another look and stop and talk with you guys. It was actually very interesting what you're up to. So can you explain what Intuitive does and how it got started? Hassan Murad: For sure. And again, Dave, thank you for having us. I'm Hassan Murad, the co-founder, CEO, and chief trash talker here at Intuitive. What Intuitive started out as - I'll take you back to myself and Vivek Vyas, who's the other co-founder of Intuitive. Both of us grew up in India and Pakistan, were born there and our families at different points immigrated to Dubai. Then we met when we were doing robotics here in Canada, in Vancouver. Our whole background was in robotics and AI. As we were starting to step foot in the real world, we had gained experiences working on drones to detect wildfires or for impact applications, submarines to do amazing things in an autonomous way, self-driving cars down at Tesla. Previously, I was proud to share working alongside Elon, but now I'm very careful. Yeah, that's not necessarily an association you want anymore. Hassan Murad: You have to be careful for sure. I describe him as the smartest person you can ever experience working for or be with, and a pioneer of this world. And at the same time, he's the dumbest person you could ever think of. But I hope this doesn't make it to him or else he will start bashing us as well. I think he has a list to go through first before he finds us. Hassan Murad: I hope so. The way that he fires off his tweets or whatever he calls it at X is just insane. Anyways, back to the point. We're both working on robotics applications and being flat on the walls in different zero to one moments where industries were being completely revolutionized by AI and we asked ourselves the question that for the next couple of years, if we are going to jump in and work on something, what is the problem that we care about solving? One thing we were really driven to think of solutions to was the waste problem. The stat that we had read at that point that was the game changer for us was that 98% of whatever we generate ends up in landfills, oceans, rivers, open dumps, and does not get recycled or composted. That basically says one percent was composted and one percent was recycled. That made us pause and say, okay, we've got to apply our solutions or backgrounds to something that's wrecking the world.  Anybody that has watched WALL-E knows how the end happens, right? What happens to Earth? That's kind of how we got started. We were developing a solution that I'm happy to go through, if it makes sense, but it was a very robotics-based solution and then we pivoted towards education. And what that means is that instead of sorting it for people, we started developing a way to nudge and change behavior so that people could recycle better and cause less contamination because one of the big things we realized was there's no sensor for waste or materials in the whole space and people are walking up and they don't realize that the three seconds they take to throw something out actually is a very important point in their journey. If they make the right decision and if we help the facility realize that value, we have a very high chance of getting that material to the right area. So what I was mentioning is rather than having a robotics-based approach and solving it for people, like handing them the fish, we taught people how to fish using AI combined with a digital screen to make it really smart and use audio visuals so that we nudge and change an individual's behavior. So the nut of this is that, and I suspect anybody listening has had this happen to them where they've been walking along with a cup of coffee with a plastic lid on it and a cardboard cup, and they're going to put it in a trash and they'll see three slots and they'll be looking at the three of them going, okay, “which one do I put this in?” And you just take a wild stab at it and put it in one that seems to make sense or somebody else has put something similar in that one.  Your whole thing is using computer vision to guide people to, based on what you're showing me in front of the camera, it ought to go in this one. Is that an accurate way of describing it? Hassan Murad: Exactly. So we make that entire process - the individual walking up has an item or multiple items that consists of multiple materials, like that coffee cup example you gave. There's the cup that is made of paper, but it's plastic lined. Depending on municipalities, it could belong in trash or paper streams if they're accepting it or recycling. Then you've got the cardboard sleeve, and then you've got that lid and sometimes you've got liquid inside. So there's four different materials that the consumer has either no time, incentive, or reason to be putting all these pieces together to sort the item out. Most of the time what happens is people just take a guess or are not even paying attention. What we change is that behavior. We have introduced Oscar sort, which is the core technology that you could put behind any recycling bin - busy bins in malls, airports, universities, stadiums. You put it behind that bin and it starts making that bin a lot more powerful. As you're approaching that bin next time, it starts even looking at you two or three feet out and it starts nudging you by visualizing how you could sort that item out. It tries to make that decision very intuitively and it attaches an incentive to it. So it's now this digital screen that actually rewards you for sorting correctly. And if you sort it incorrectly, well, Oscar could get grouchy. This whole gamification in a simple decision that was so pivotal for the facility, but also downstream, is where we've brought fun engagement and really changed the whole landscape. So the business model on this is what? Hassan Murad: Traditionally, when you look at an airport, a mall, a university, a corporate campus, everybody pays for a garbage bin and garbage bins have a recurring cost, because you have to make sure they're being serviced and not overflowing. In different areas, you have sorting requirements downstream. So if people don't sort, they'll take it downstairs to potentially sort as well. When you look in San Francisco, many stadiums we've chatted with have 10-15 physical people at the back sorting all the bins out and that is where Oscar has been approved as the technology - you don't need people at the back end to sort anymore because Oscar can help people do that. That was our starting niche. We started by focusing on Airports that have this bottleneck problem and we've been providing different amounts of Oscar sorts to these areas to help start their journey. As you see this scale we're trying to reach, we're trying to make a dent in the universe in terms of the whole waste world. It's not going to make an impact when out of 700 bins or 200 bins in a stadium, we just provide 5 or 10 bins. That is where we have accelerated the business model towards a property becoming a partner of ours and we partner with them so that we provide Oscar Sorts to their facility and we utilize brands that are already on the Oscar screen. So people are paying to be on the screen and they're the brand that wants to say hi to Dave that is walking up. So that coffee cup you're talking about is branded rather than generic. The chips bag, the bottle, the can. You can start seeing how brands want to be the brand in front of an individual as they're walking up, since we've created this new type of experience. We've flipped the model around. We call it the Oscar Media and Materials Exchange - in short, it's OMX. That basically allows any busy property, whether it's in New York or Toronto or LA or anywhere, a busy property like a mall, university, airport, stadium, can put Oscars in, they can raise their hand to put Oscars in and we have sponsors and partners that will fund those units. So it has flipped this model so that we can get hundreds and actually make a material impact. When I was at DSC, if my memory is correct, which is always questionable, I think you had something in excess of a thousand units in the field and each of those units was in the range of $15k capital cost to put in.  I was impressed that you're out to a thousand and impressed that venues would spend $15k on this. Is that something you still do or is it just completely flipped around where you will put it in at no cost and recover your money from the brands? Hassan Murad: We have flipped the model and OMX is our primary focus. We've proven the technology at the most leading airports, universities, stadiums, etc. And that's been an amazing journey - proving that people would pay, that it helps the operations of the facility, also that brands are fighting to be on the screen. An example I can mention is when people walk up - and you probably saw this at DSC - we're seeing people spend a lot of time at the bins. Traditionally, nobody would get zero seconds at the bin - they toss it in as they're moving. What we're seeing is about ten seconds of engagement when somebody is trying to sort an item because they're like, what is this thing doing? And usually when they throw their item - I love asking this question - what do you think is the most shown item to an Oscar globally? It'd be between soda tins and coffee cups, I would imagine. Hassan Murad: Those are definitely the top five categories. But the most shown item, and this is where we saw that this is actually an engagement tool is that the most show item we started seeing was mobile phones. The behavior, once we started auditing and going to sites and doing behavioral user studies, is that people walk up, throw their item, and they're like, all right, this thing is telling me how to sort. What's the next thing I can show or try to trick it? That's essentially where everybody has a mobile phone. So they take it out of their pocket or show the phone to see what Oscar does. We quickly iterated in the early days to add in a nudge or an Easter egg that essentially tells you, "Hey, put that back in your pocket." I thought it was drug dealers with burner phones. Hassan Murad: No, not thinking in that way at all. Dave, you're watching too much Narcos. Yeah, probably. Hassan Murad: But essentially, we started seeing people show a lot of their phones again, not throw, show a lot of their phones. And then instantly, when we inserted the Easter egg, you saw that people are bringing their loved ones to be like, look, when I show my phone, it says, “Put that back in your pocket” and that became an Instagram instant hit, on Tik TOK and other areas as well.  That really was the beginning of us understanding that this is an engagement tool. We have what we call the “bin-tersection moment”, right? People are going about their day and they're at this intersection that is like white space right now, nobody even notices it and we can actually disrupt and add value to their day by dropping something that is interesting to them. That was that whole journey and so now we see anywhere from one to two minutes of time being spent at the Oscar bin and usually people go, “What? How?” and there are these nudges that I just described to you. You can show items. But we also introduced something that we saw to be very popular and tested out in stadiums, called Trivia.  And essentially what trivia is, you do a thumbs up to say yes, the question that you've asked me is correct, or a thumbs down to say it's wrong. And it's quizzing you on things. So if you're at a stadium at TD Garden, it's asking you about the Celtics. It's asking you about Carrie Underwood if she's performing at the back or Taylor Swift or whatever's happening. It's bringing up the relevant questions to connect with you with why you are there. In terms of how this all plays out, you've got the garbage bins, obviously, you've got a screen in behind it. Is there a typical size?  Hassan Murad: No, we retrofit any of their material collection systems, right? So they might have trash, recycling, compost, batteries, and collection bins. It could be textile, it could be beauty products, it could be anything that they're collecting at the property.  They might be different sizes and configurations and everything else? You've got to figure it out case by case almost?  Hassan Murad: No, we've got a standard 43 inch that we just provide, and if it's something that's wider, then we can provide two. So it's modular, it latches on, it's a never ending waste bin.  Do you ruggedize the thing?  Hassan Murad: Yes, exactly. So it's obviously in airports and stadiums and other areas and it's built with aluminum and we've got casings, wherever people opt for that.  Because at a Sox game, somebody's going to take that can and try to use the screen as a backboard…? Hassan Murad: The funny thing is actually, Dave, we see little to no vandalism to the Oscar other than when construction is happening at that site. So that's good.  Do you have a camera up above the display that's looking at, I assume, chest height of a typical human and doing pattern detection and looking for is that a can, is that a bag, is that a phone or whatever it may be, right?  Hassan Murad: Yeah, exactly. It's pointing straight towards the bins where, and when anybody walks up to the Oscar, it blurs and destroys any information above the waist and so it just focuses on materials, waste, gestures, for example, if they're trying to play around with it, any items the site wants us to train for, to make it a fun experience.  How do you know that it's anonymous, so to speak?  Is there feedback on the screen that shows that your face is blurred out?  Hassan Murad: Exactly. So it's right then and there that it just shows people what's happening in the back end and I think that's very powerful to be doing.  The creepiest thing is when you see other people put in cameras and they don't share details around what's exactly happening in the back end and that's something that's very different here. We work with governments of the world. We work with universities, schools, and so it's very important to have people understand what's happening.  Like you just said, every Oscar right in the middle has the view so people can understand what's going on, but also there's a QR code right next to it so that they can understand, all right, what exactly is happening? What do you do with waste and materials? What are you trying to do here? And that's very important.  What's the incentive for a venue, like an NHL arena, to install these units? Do they receive a share of the brand marketing revenue, or that comes back to you and their benefit is simply getting it for free while improving waste diversion and sorting? Hassan Murad: It's a combination of both. You know how expensive it was to get an Oscar, that primarily is the biggest driver to a lot of people. If they wanted hundreds, they couldn't get that approval. They could get five or four units in, and this is now helping them to put this in at little to no cost from a property side and then it is added value towards sponsorships and advertising and activations which is a whole different team that is like, holy cow, there is a very customized experience. These are AI powered digital screens that drive impact, get two minutes of people's time that they're giving away and I have this available to me so that I can actually have a sponsor or have added value to this site.    So could imagine adding a million plus dollars worth of value to your site if you just placed Oscar sorts across your bins. It increases the value of the property, but really the main reason people put it in is that this $15,000 thing is now being funded for them. It is going to help their operations. They're going to audit and understand what is going through their bin so they can improve their procurement and supply chain and then they actually understand if people are sorting better or not, so they have less cost downstream.   Those three things combined are very expensive to do because you have to hire consultants and do audits and dig through trash and we're making it very intuitive and easy using this OMX business model. Any property can apply. The main thing is people have to be visiting that property and obviously, you understand the digital out-of-home space is that the value of the property is if people are visiting and people and brands want to get in front and center over there that's through the Oscar sort.   Going from a business model where you were selling into these kinds of environments and they were spending the capital to put them in and as you said, it's limiting what they can do. If you flip it around and you go to, let's say SoFi stadium in LA, where they want to have, I don't know, 120 of them, you get that deal and you're probably ringing the sales bell and everything else all excited and then somebody has to run the numbers and go, that's a big capital nut to do all that.  It's a big change to go from selling them to having to deploy at scale. So how did you work out the capital and finance side of that?  Hassan Murad: Yeah, and I think the right number for the site only pops up when we do an analysis of the site, right? They might have 150 bins but the most impactful ones are the cross section of that: do all of these bins get materials thrown out? And materials thrown out means people walk up there and we only focus on the busiest of bins, right? Because if you want to make an impact on the waste stream side, you've got to make sure people are actually accessing that. Accessing that means that you're getting the eyeballs and impressions. The powerful thing about this is that it scales and it focuses on the busiest of the bins. That's something we work with the property on.  In terms of how the numbers are crunched and how we help the property. I think that's been something that has been quite straightforward to people as they look at this like they're running ads in different form factors across the stadium on screens on the jumbotrons and stuff like that and then they look at the Oscar and they're like, “All right, it welcomes me and when I'm not using it it is essentially playing curated content, which are traditional digital out of home ads, and then when I walk towards it, it essentially says “Hi” which could be a branded way, or it could be how the property wants us to. So it understands when somebody is close to it, so it's very measured, and then essentially, what are they doing? Are they starting to play the trivia? And after you answer the trivia, that might be AMEX powered, where American Express is giving you, if you've answered the questions correctly and you're the lucky winner, a trip to Hawaii.  And that's the beauty of it. People are connecting and giving away different things through this medium where they know it is being measured rather than throwing in a QR code and on some screen and it's just not effective. When you made this pivot, what's your deployed footprint now then? When I was talking back in December, it was around a thousand.   Hassan Murad: I can't share exact numbers, but now we're talking about tens of thousands and we'll be talking about it soon publicly. In terms of numbers and scale, it just has rapidly blown up.   Are these tens of thousands deployed or under contract today?   Hassan Murad: Under contract today.   The other question I had, because when you started off, you're talking about robotics and AI and everything else. Those are very engineering-centric kinds of pursuits and now you find yourself in the digital out-of-home media business, at least in an adjacent way.    Those are very different kinds of meetings and very different kinds of people who speak their own language. How are you navigating that?   Hassan Murad: I think this is just the nature of everybody at Intuitive is that we rewire our brains almost every year. When you're married to the problem and not the solution, you almost have to let go of what you know and what you think is right and be very unbiased and just be heads down to what is the most scalable way.  Just to mention this as well, when we were starting off, a lot of people were like, "All right, well, you could use advertisements to scale these units." At that point, the fundamentals of the Oscar Sort were improving - whether people would walk up to it, whether people would prefer this bin over another bin. There was this Hawthorne effect that was coming into play that a camera is helping you and is that helpful towards Oscar or against it? There were a lot of variables right at the start that we had to prove. We had to make sure that people would actually pay for the device. And not even the first year, but now we have customers that are paying in their fifth and sixth year. That was very powerful to see and prove. Now is that perfect time where we've engaged these sponsors that we're talking about. Like our partnership with Pepsi, for example, that was publicly announced a couple months ago. They want to target all their key properties that they want to be going at, key malls, stadiums, universities, airports. It just tells you that brands want to take over the narrative and really make sure that they don't want all these middle layers to communicate to the consumer about recycling or material capture, about anything. If we can get straight away to them, that's what's amazing to see and we're doing that with other brands as well.  That mobile phone example I gave you, a major mobile phone provider or telco saw that and the phone popped up. They were like, "Well, can we get exclusivity on this?" That's the thing. It doesn't have to be a CPG or a materials-focused company to be advertising or sponsoring the Oscars. There are different brand moments. This is the way if you're doing anything sustainability, this is the channel to talk about what is the end of life. That's the unique thing about it. Of course, anybody can play standard ads and we have all the measured metrics versus a simple dumb screen out there because we have the sensor measuring interactions, engagements, passerby, things like that. So that's actually measurable rather than getting some data from some source. I mean, I've been at this for 25 years and I've seen countless digital out-of-home efforts.  We've got phone charging stations, we've got trash bins, we've got ATM toppers, we've got this and that and almost every one of them has not worked out because they were sold purely on the basis of an opportunity to see and here was an available space where they could stick these into a store or other environment, but there wasn't any other thinking beyond that. You have some connective tissue to that idea but it's also very different, as you said. Hassan Murad: That's where I think you can look at our history as well. It is not that we started building an advertising network right off the bat, but it was just really making sure people find value, create items that add value to properties that actually solve the massive problem and it is a self-sustaining business by itself and then we're seeing people accelerate to hundreds and thousands of units by itself because they want to get in front of people's attention and get their impressions.  So merging these two things is now the accelerant to creating OMX, which is essentially the first climate focused or materials focused digital out-of-home network that we're building. All right, that was very interesting. Thanks for spending some time with me. Hassan Murad: Yeah, of course, Dave. Thanks for having us.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The people who build and maintain very large networks of displays, PCs, servers and other devices tend to have more to do than time to do it, and when some technical shit hits the operating fan, trying to work out what's happening and what to do about it takes experience, brainpower and what can be punishing downtime. So what if generative AI could be used by a network operations center team to comb through knowledge bases and trouble ticket archives to identify solutions in seconds, instead of minutes or hours? And what if a lot of meat and potato workflows done to deliver services and maintain uptimes could be automated, and handled by an AI bot? That's the premise of Netspeek, a start-up that formally came out of stealth mode this week - with an AI-driven SaaS solution aimed at integrators, solutions providers and enterprise-level companies that use a lot of AV gear. The Boston-based company is focused more at launch on unified communications, because of the scale and need out there. But Netspeek's toolset is also applicable to digital signage, and can bolt on to existing device management solutions. The guy driving this will be familiar in digital signage hardware circles. Erik DeGiorgi was running the specialty PC firm MediaVue, but sold that company about a year ago. Since then, he's been forehead-deep working with a small dev team on Netspeek. We caught up last week and he gave me the rundown. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Erik, nice to chat once again. You sold your company about a year ago, and I don't want to say disappeared, but kind of went off the grid in terms of digital signage, and now you are launching a new company called Netspeek. What is that?  Erik DeGiorgi: Thanks for having me back, Dave. It's crazy. Time flies. I think it's well over two years at this point since our last conversation.  We launched Netspeek at the beginning of the year. At the same time, we sold out MediaVue. Netspeek is bringing to market the first generative AI platform focused on supporting the day-to-day operations of mixed vendor estates of pro AV networks. Digital signage is certainly a component of that. We're really focused on the totality of pro AV technologies. So it includes a lot of UCC unified collaborations and communications technologies as well as signage, and really targeting office spaces. So think about meeting rooms and conference rooms. You might have a Zoom or a Teams environment in there as well as a signage system or classroom environments, and what we've developed is a generative AI solution that can be embedded into those networks, that can work alongside human operators, network administrators, technicians to help them support them in their daily workflows, and then also bring a large amount of automation. So our platform can not only kind of observe what's going on in a network, kind of a 24/7-365 way, but then take action and use its own logic and reason and independent thinking to analyze situations the same way a human operator would and then structure and generate responses. So being able to directly address equipment and solve problems independently. We're pretty excited to bring that to market. We're launching to the industry here in a week, and then we'll be demoing at ISE at the beginning of February.  You'll have your own stand at ISE? Erik DeGiorgi: Yes, and I did pull up the booth number ahead of the call, but of course now it's on a different tab. It's in the Innovation Park, and the booth number is CS820, and it's actually centrally located there in the Innovation Park. So actually right outside the digital signage area.  Yeah, I think for people going to ISE, the Innovation Park is kind of along the main corridor in between halls.  Erik DeGiorgi: Yep, it's the central hallway.  Okay, so people should be able to find you there.  Erik DeGiorgi: Hopefully, yep.  Not a sprawling booth like a Samsung or LG or something, but…  Erik DeGiorgi: We measure in single meters. I think it's a 2x3 meter booth.  Startup life. Erik DeGiorgi: The price was right.  There are lots of device management platforms out there, either independent third-party platforms that you would subscribe to and bolt onto your system or a fair number of companies, whether they're integrators or CMS software companies in the context of digital signage have their own device management code written in, how is this different?  Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, absolutely. Netspeek is not another monitoring platform. Monitoring is a necessary component, right? You need to know what you have on the network and know what it's doing as a foundation. But our value really lies in the intelligence that we're bringing into that. So it's taking that monitoring and observation, but then actually doing something with it in doing that either again to assist a human by bringing kind of an encyclopedic knowledge and institutional knowledge or whether it's through the automation, and so we're going to market with a total solution. We have a monitoring platform that we've developed as a necessary part of our total solution, but we actually are also partnering with existing remote monitoring and management platforms to essentially bolt on to them, and then bring that intelligence to their monitoring platform and actually at ISE, you'll be able to see that as well.  So they should happily run in parallel using APIs or…?  Erik DeGiorgi: Yep. So we hook into the existing monitoring platform and we essentially bolt on the, the reasoning and the intelligence, and then allow an existing user to leverage that front end, and that monitoring platform that they're already familiar with. Who do you think you're primarily going to be selling this into? Is it like integrators and service providers who have network operation centers or would it be end users?  Erik DeGiorgi: So it's a little bit of both, and candidly at an early stage, you tend to take a bit more of a scattershot approach, and test where the value emerges. It's a new technology, gen AI, everybody knows it's there and in a large part don't know what to do with it. But we've kind of honed in on three initial go to market opportunities. One is like a total solution directed towards the end user. One is more of a channel centric focus, whether it's a system integrator managed service provider. We're actually already engaged with a few, of each, that are interested in leveraging the platform in that capacity. And then also, like I said, with, an existing management. You could be a manufacturer. So think about even an independent manufacturer, or a platform provider, like an existing monitoring platform. So an existing tool is specific to a manufacturer or a tool for more broad-based management. Like I said, we can kind of bolt into those and go to market that way as well.  So in the scenario of a network operation center in the context of digital signage, an integrator that's doing the work to monitor a large QSR network for a restaurant chain that doesn't want to do that internally and they've got a whole bunch of screens up on a wall and they've got big curved desktop screens and the whole bit and they're watching what's going on.  Is the idea here in part that. As a problem develops and it's kind of weird and not familiar that if you had to go into a whole bunch of manuals and archived information, it would take many minutes, maybe even hours to do it versus if this is all on a learned model that the solution or at least ideas on a resolution could come up in seconds? Erik DeGiorgi: We really kind of lean into the personification of our platform. So our product is called Lena and Lena is an acronym that stands for Language Enabled Network Administrator. So we really have modeled the platform and the solution after the workflows that human operators perform every day. So imagine being in that knock and sitting there next to your colleague, Lena and Lena happens to be trained on every respective certification related to the deployment, and has been trained in every application software that's being used, has an encyclopedic knowledge of every technical document for every piece of equipment or technology that's in that deployment, has the ability to - at the speed of light - comb through any historical information like previous support tickets or anything like that that's been related.  So being confronted with a situation, whether that's a critical situation or whether it's looking at something that's preventative, or maintenance-oriented, just imagine having this kind of superhuman user that can just as a human operator analyze the situation, develop a logic flow, think critically about that situation, pull in outside information to help diagnose a potential issue, construct a resolution, and then either autonomously or along with a human companion and approval, go ahead and execute that action. One of the things that Lena can do out of the box is we've done all the integrations, and I say all we've done many, and we're continuing to do many more integrations with all the different devices and technologies that you see in these networks. So, as a generative AI, Lena can generate information for human consumption, but Lena can also generate structured information that translate down to device commands in various ways. So Lena can actually take action and do things on her own, and, we default to saying “her” because get used to personifying. Some people lean into that, some people don't. But you really kind of think about it as this if you had your next hire, your next employee that had all of this institutional knowledge and had the ability to take action in this way.  What would be the ROI on something like that? I assume that if there's a problem emerging that seems kind of weird, that can take quite a bit of time theoretically to come to a resolution, unless you have somebody on staff who is almost like Lena and has that encyclopedic knowledge, otherwise it's going to take many minutes, right?  Erik DeGiorgi: We quantify value in two ways, coming from two different directions. Again, think about the application. We're primarily focused on day one is kind of meeting spaces, conference rooms, classrooms, that type of stuff. So you have people, employees, workers going into those spaces, and your sales and marketing people having meetings every day and using those spaces. How much downtime is there in those rooms and what's the value of eliminating some of that downtime, right? So it's kind of a workforce efficiency quantification and we ran that as an exercise and based on our pricing models and some averages of salaries for typical people and took a stab at it and if we save one person in one room two minutes a day, it pays for itself. So imagine a meeting of four people. If you can shave 30 seconds off of that, it pays for itself. So that's kind of one way to look at it.  The other way is what you were talking about is kind of the operational side. What is the cost to operate these networks and to develop that skilled labor, to deploy that skilled labor? And even with that skilled labor, there's kind of the human component. It takes time to process information to think through things. Lena operates at a different pace. So being able to not only just problem solve, troubleshoot, and come to a resolution quicker, but our real objective is actually to mitigate most of those problems from occurring to begin with. We're going to be showing a couple of things at ISE. I'll just give you a tangible example. A room check is something that we're going to be demonstrating. So for those unaware, at most corporate spaces, there are people that go around and check the rooms on a daily and weekly basis. It's a high frequency. It's a very manual process. I'm going room to room running a test call, making sure things are working before the start of the day. It's a high labor, high cost process. So we're actually demonstrating an automated room check where Lena being embedded in the network can go and perform that activity autonomously at really any frequency.  So we're actually going to break the system and we'll be demoing Lena identifying that and actually resolving it. So something's logged out. I'm going to log back into that room's zoom account and run a test call and give it the green light. That's a very tangible thing. That's a real world thing that a lot of people do in these spaces that costs a lot of money and it's something that we're going to be able to help out with.  Is this the way AI works, is it kind of a continuous learning thing, where the more that Lena is applied to a system, the more it's learning about its quirks and things that happen, or is it kind of a preset load of information and it's just working off of that? Erik DeGiorgi: It's an interesting question. I would answer that by saying it's kind of a hybrid, because there's a couple things there. So first there's, I think, a data security and data integrity aspect, and that's something we take very seriously. So we were deploying and as we grow and many enterprises as we did in our previous company, of course, we're not going to be extracting any information or learning from that specific application and bringing that into the general knowledge. So none of our users' information related to this specific network gets brought into the general learning, right? So we take a very, data security approach. I mean, AI is exciting. It's going to change things, but it's also scary, right? It's new, and we want to make sure that we have a very clear focus. I'm in a very clear message around that, that as we deploy this, any state specific or enterprise specific information is retained by that and it's not brought back into the general knowledge. But, in a different way of answering that question, our platform is built to think critically about situations and develop its own logic flows and reasoning flows. So what it is not is pre programmed, in a sense. If this, then that, right? That's not what we've done. We've created a body of knowledge and we've created a set of contexts and parameters, and then we allow Lena to kind of think on her own in order to address and identify and work essentially, again, the way a person would. So there's kind of a big question we could go in a couple different directions, but I don't know if that helps at all.  Yeah, it does. I'm curious. The thing about AI, particularly in its early ages, and it's come a long way in the last year and a half, but one of the concerns was around hallucinations and AI models just making shit up. How do you kind of wall that in so that if you have a resource archive that when Lena is trying to troubleshoot something and it comes up with a resolution, how confident can you be that this it's absolutely working off of what's there and not just kind of imagineering some other solution? Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, absolutely. So just as a human being would, if I ask you a question, you're going to want to have an answer, right? And if you don't really know the answer, you might kind of fudge it, right? These models are not too dissimilar in that respect. So it's a complicated answer. There are several, if not many things that can be done. There's a lot of context that's provided, so Lena is never reaching out to the internet and looking for information. Lena's on rails in that sense, there's a very kind of tight context, we have built in mechanisms within the platform to self audit and self check so when Lena is presenting something, you know like, here's an issue. I'm going to construct a potential resolution to that. There's actually mechanisms that we've built into the platform that will take that output and fact check it, if that makes sense, at a high level.  So you're absolutely right. It's absolutely a problem. But there are several mechanisms that we've put in place in order to mitigate hallucination, and quite seriously, we interact with this platform quite a bit as you can imagine, and it's really not an issue. So with automation, are there kind of guardrails around that? Because if anybody who's watched Hollywood movies thinks about Skynet and Terminator and everything in between. So if there's a problem, would Lena decide, okay, we're having a problem with overheating, so I'll just turn off all the power in the building. Erik DeGiorgi: No, I mean, again, Lena has very tight parameters, right? And it's actually not that hard to constrain a model in that way. We're not just letting this thing loose and it's multifold, right? So it's built into Lena's programming to not do that, but beyond that, automation is enabled as much as the human counterpart want to, right? So  are there non mission critical things that we're allowing when it's fully automated? Are there things that we need, human confirmation, it kind of just depends on the workflow. It depends on the application, how much you want to automate and how much you don't to be candid. You know, we're learning what the temperature of the early adopters is and seeing it. It's a brave new world for all of us. We're trying to figure out, it's all new, right. And it's not gonna be hell where it kills the crew to protect the mission. So it's far more benevolent, I think. I like to think about it more as the computer on the Starship Enterprise. Let's use, like, a good one, right? It's your friendly AI that's keeping track of all your critical systems and is there to help you work through problems. I'm guessing among potential customers, there's at least a couple of lines of thinking. One being that Lena would allow us to do more with the staff that we have in our knocks or whatever their operation they're thinking about for it, but the other one would be Lena can take the place of like five staffers and we can save half a million bucks or something  Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, it's an interesting question. It's one we actually talk about quite a bit and you know, disruption disrupts in many ways, right? This technology is most certainly disruptive and that's not just in signage,it's going to be in every aspect of our life going forward. But I believe and it's just not my belief, but it's what I hear and observe, is that the teams, the humans that are actually tasked with doing the operational work every day are so overwhelmed, that it's going to be more of the former, right? At least at the outset, certainly, there's so much we were talking about it the other day. You know, we have an immense amount of data. How much data comes out of these networks use your, example network, you were talking about the retail installation, how much data comes back from that network, whether it's telemetry or whether it's telemetry coming back at the device level or whether it's information based on viewership. I mean, there's so much data that's coming from these systems. How much of it's actually used? You know, I don't know, if I take a stab at it, under 10%, 5%, I mean, probably very little of it's actually used. It's overload. So why don't you just put it on and now you have your data analyst and you can actually leverage that information. So there's a lot of work that's not being done in the spaces that Lena can step in and do that can support and work alongside human operators that are presently overtasked. For those people who are listening and thinking well, this sounds interesting. I wonder if this can apply to my business and my operation they would then be wondering How do I do this? Am I buying an enterprise license? Am I having to install a local server? Is it a SaaS model? How does all this work? Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, so we are a pure SaaS model, and again there's a couple of different go to markets, whether it's your channel, but let's just say like the direct to end user. If I'm an enterprise and I want to adopt the platform, it's a SaaS model, it's largely a cloud based, all the magic goes on and in our cloud infrastructure.  There's an edge client that gets deployed into each of the local networks in the enterprise, and between the cloud infrastructure, between the edge client, which is typically virtualized in the network, we securely and safely can communicate with all of the connected devices and operate the network as we've been talking about. What kind of a learning curve is involved? I mean, I assume this is not the sort of thing that you just sign up for and get your activation code, plug it in and off you go to the races, like there would have to be quite a bit of onboarding, I would imagine.  Erik DeGiorgi: Right. Well, so there is onboarding. I would say, in comparison to maybe some of the other universal multi vendor monitoring and management tools, it's less. I'll explain why. The burden to onboard our platform, so of course we work very closely with the client to do all of this, but we essentially do an asset dump, right?  So every enterprise has a spectrum of asset management, let's just say, from enterprise to enterprise. So we bring that in, we clean it, we structure it so we know where everything is, there's a physical check to make sure that the right equipment is in the right place every. Again, we're focusing on rooms and meeting spaces and that kind of thing. So there's typically a specific vocabulary or nomenclature to those spaces that might be named after a sports team or something. I actually had an account of, believe it or not, that was named their rooms geographical places, but actually geographical places that they had other offices. So they had literally an office in Paris that had rooms called Milan and Berlin and everything. So imagine having to figure out how to train the model to not get screwed up with that. But nonetheless, that's our problem.  So there's a bit of specific learning to the application. You onboard the devices and then really you're off and running because there's two main things that we do. We've done all the integrations with the devices so you really don't have to do that and unlike existing platforms where you have to do a lot of programming, like let's say you wanted a single touch to reboot a room or something like that and there's three or four devices or log into something, right? Typically, you'd have to program those subroutines and create those command structures, but all that's generated in our platform. So it's really saying, this is what I have, this is where it is, and that's it. So yes, there's onboarding, but compared to existing platforms, it's actually quite light.  Is that onboarding part of the SaaS fee or am I paying like a number to get that part done? Erik DeGiorgi: We're still figuring that out. What the objective and what we've done thus far is: you sign a contract with us. We do that work for you. There's no upfront fees and you're just paying your, your typical SaaS.  But you're kind of learning on the fly and you may realize, Jesus, this is taking like two weeks of labor to onboard each our clients and need to do charge something to cover that  Erik DeGiorgi: Well, that's why I chose my words carefully because I might we're figuring it out as we go. But that's the objective, right? The objective is that we just want to make it really clean, really simple. Hey, you're a customer you're locked into a year or two or three a contract, it's fine. We're going to get you up and running and we're going to support you along the way, and we're not going to nickel and dime you.  So you talked to an integrator, I know you're kind of pre selling this to companies, at least making them aware. How are they responding?  Erik DeGiorgi: Well, very well. We had a UC, industry veteran join us several months ago, he has about 30 years in the industry, Polycom, Crestron, and almost every day, we're having lots of really high level conversations with end users, integrators, partners at all levels. We just kind of pinch ourselves. We're still batting a thousand, like every single conversation has led to more and everybody's very excited about it. You know, there's been this huge AI buzz. There really hasn't been a lot behind it, behind the buzz, and so we're super excited to show real world applications, bringing actual value to the industry and it's resonating, and we're very excited. We had a pre-call and I asked about the level of activity among particularly larger companies in AI, and I was surprised when you said that it's largely just a roadmap item still for most companies.  Erik DeGiorgi: Overwhelmingly, with a couple exceptions, the general feedback that we get is: we need to figure out how to do something with you. We know AI needs to be part of our strategy. You know, it's on paper and that's kind of about as far as we've gotten with it.  If people want to know more about this, they could find you online at Netspeek.com, right?  Erik DeGiorgi: That's right. Netspeek.com, and of course on LinkedIn, and for those going to the show we'd love to see you there.  All right. Thank you, Erik. Erik DeGiorgi: Great to catch up, Dave. Thanks so much.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The UK software firm Evexi has an interesting story behind its move into digital signage - in that it was more a pull from a client than a push by the company itself. They got deeper into it because of a client's needs, and then a change in technology support that really forced the hand of the customer and Evexi. A few years on from that big moment, Evexi is growing out its CMS software business based around a very modern, headless platform and tools that the company says manage to bridge a need for being dead-simple to use but also deeply sophisticated and hyper-secure. CEO Andrew Broster relates in this podcast the story behind Evexi, and how it goes to market. There's also a very interesting anecdote in there about how lift and learn tech is more than just a visual trick for retail merchandising - with Broster telling how it was driving serious sales lift for a big whiskey brand. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Andrew, thank you for coming on this podcast. Can you give me a rundown, like the elevator ride story of Evexi?  Andrew Broster: Sure. Thanks for having me, Dave. My background is very technical. I spent about ten years prior to setting up Evexi running a managed service for a private cloud-based business. In 2015, Sky came to us through a partner and asked for an advertising platform to be built into pub networks, where they had 10,000 pubs under contract to sell Sky Sports to.  We walked away and said, what was the question? But eight months later, the product was released into the pub network and it has nearly 2,700 pubs going live within just under 12 months and really from there, we were working with an existing CMS provider, Scala and we learned a lot of the pains with integrating into third-party systems, platforms, building, customer portals, because the traditional CMSs are not user friendly, and as a result, that was our first digital signage customer and our first project that we launched. So what would you call yourself when you were getting into this with Sky, were you like an independent software vendor who just did custom work for customers?  Andrew Broster: Correct. Yeah, it was literally, “Hey, Andrew, we need to build this workflow portal.” We were trying to solve problems at a software level for end users through, in those days, it was actually still the channel and that was the first exposure we ever had to the channel.  Okay. Now, though, you have your own product.  Andrew Broster: Yes, at the end of 2018, early 2019, we launched Evexi, purely on the grounds of Sky needing a different CMS vendor because Scala was the end-of-life Samsung system on chip support and yeah, Evexi came live and we flipped 2,700 pubs overnight onto our platform, and we were talking about taking a big leap, that was a big leap for and a big learning curve  And how do you do that overnight? The common perception would be if you're going to change 2,000 devices over you've got to visit 2,000 devices or you've got to Telnet into them or something or other and monkey around with each of them  Andrew Broster: No, what we ended up doing was as we created a reboot script that was rewriting the URL from the URL launcher on a Samsung screen and instead of Scala, we flipped them remotely to ourselves.  So with this business, you were asked to develop something for a specific client. Did you look at the marketplace and go, all right, we can do this for sure. We've got a client who wants it We can turn this into a larger business, but boy, there are already a lot of CMS software platforms out there, how do we differentiate ourselves? Andrew Broster: I don't think it was even that really. I think right back in the beginning my other shareholder said to me, is this a mistake? Are we going to just generate a lot of debt within the business? Is this a hard business to get into? I spent probably about three to four months, looking at the landscape, looking at companies, competitors, and companies that basically had one successful client and then struggled to grow out of the single client, and really from my point of view, it was, because I was very technical by nature, I wanted to be able to build a platform that was using the latest technologies. A lot of our competitors, less so now, but at the time in 2018-2019, were using a lot of aging software technologies, and scaling issues, so just single servers.  I'm a network architect by trade. I wanted to build a cloud-based platform that uses the same technologies as Amazon AWS and Netflix, and that really for me was the ability to have what I call a native cloud product and not make the same mistakes that everybody else does, because when you're building a product and trying to go to market, you have to really try and avoid making all your competitors' mistakes. So you ended up with what I believe you describe as a headless CMS, right?  Andrew Broster: Yeah, it's a headless CMS. By design it was headless, and then we put in a very simple UI because we had right back in those days, about 2,300 landlords wanting to publish their own content. So it really had to be very straightforward to use and we wanted to automate everything else in the backend. So things like rendering automatic web content, being able to have a platform that's open that anyone can build onto.  I'm from an open-source background originally, so I wanted to make these tools readily available to all of the partners and the ecosystem we're working in. So when you say headless CMS, what does that mean for a typical end user?  What I think about is that you've got creatives, people who are working on online products and so on, who don't want to back out of their normal workflow, platforms and log into something separate just to do digital signage. Andrew Broster: Correct, and for the larger companies integrating into our APIs, which are publicly available, means that we become an extension of their product suite rather than copy and pasting and moving content around. We just end up at the end of the line of the production, and then content gets scheduled, instead of having to log into another system. I'm a big fan of automating and integrating everything. What would be a good kind of reference example of companies that you're working with that you're allowed to talk about?  Andrew Broster: Sky is the obvious one. We did a lot of work with David Lloyd, on some projects for their gyms. Johnny Walker and Diageo in South Africa. And they've integrated into our APIs as well, whereby, they had a lift and learn solution using Nexomsphere integrated into Evexi. They built their own web apps sitting on top of a platform for the customer user journey, and then every time you want to go and change products, they have their own merchandising platform. So it gives the whole user journey without even touching a backseat, to be honest with you, and we just turn into ultimately a distribution engine because what we're doing is providing the player to be sophisticated and be able to play whatever content has been built and developed, but the changing the scheduling and interaction of it is all done through our APIs. So you mentioned the Sky project. That's still fully going. What kind of footprint does that have at the moment?  Andrew Broster: It still has around 2,000 screens. I think they're very heavily looking at the market at the moment, and seeing who else is doing it. Stone Gates are doing a great job at the moment, running out of a media platform into a pub network and I think it's fair to say we all collectively are just watching that to be honest with  You're all watching it for?  Andrew Broster: To see how that project evolves and whether it's going to be a success. I mean Sky were the early adopters of this in pub networks and I think like anything in this world, to be able to attract the big liquor brands and the beverage brands, you need to have a reasonable footfall, and that was always the argument right back in the beginning. How do you pump advertising revenue into your advertising network, unless you've got a footfall of half a million to three quarters of a million people.  Right. You're doing a lot of work with Nexonsphere. I just did a podcast with them a couple of weeks ago.  Andrew Broster: I know them well.  I like what they do and it's interesting that “Lift and Learn” is something that's been around for 20 years, but it used to be really hard to do. Is that what's being used for Johnny Walker and could you describe it?  Andrew Broster: Yes, it is exactly that. So if you walk into a liquor store in South Africa, you can pick up a product. It'll tell you about the product. You can pick up another product. It'll compare the two products, and then you follow the user journey on a screen after you've picked up the products to be able to inquire or pick up more information about the product. So in the Johnny Walker world, it's about understanding the different flavors of Johnny Walker and what the blend and what the mixes you have with the alcohol and the key to all of that is to understand who's using the product and to be able to provide that information back to the brand.  For me, that was a great project for us because we had so little involvement. I know that sounds ridiculous, but when you have a technical partner who is very tech focused, very marketing focused and who knows how to build apps using documentation, we have very little interaction, but I think really the beauty of it is the numbers that are coming back now is that they're seeing across, I think it's about 160 to 180 sites, they're seeing between a 40 and 42 percent uplift in sales and the tills as a result of using learned because they're doing a lot of A/B testing. So we know it works, and for us, it's making the next must be integration. Now, you don't have these drop down menus, don't have a CMS that's completely and utterly configure-centric, just need to be able to build out your solution because no Lift and Learn solution is the same and you need to be able to get there in 5 or 10 minutes. Right, because you want this to be largely in the hands of the integrator, the provider, whoever.  Andrew Broster: Our objective is to make the integrators' lives easy. If we can't make their lives easy, what's the point really from my point of view, frankly, of existing. They need to make money like we need to make money and the easiest way of doing that is just to make their lives easy. When you're on a journey of looking at getting into space and analyzing the other platforms that are out there, the other approaches and so on, what kind of conclusions did you draw about what you needed to do? Andrew Broster: How I looked at it was: We have many small customers and we have some very nice blue chip, large customers, and ultimately you need to make the small customers' lives very easy, three steps to be able to publish content and manage your content, and then when it comes to the big boys, you need to be able to become an extension of their existing workflows. Our goal really was, is to just build something that one is open, and two is very easy for an end user to use, because ultimately, in our space, we have systems integrators that are ultimately just resellers and they just resell the service and they're not technical, and then we have other integrators that we call our technical partners that are hugely technical. I want to be able to do stuff that we haven't even dreamt of yet, and it's the ability for them to be able to have that platform to do what they want.  So if you're going to do headless, it sounds like you have to have that capability, but for the small to medium business customer, they're probably not going to use the headless element so you've got to have a full UX for them, right?  Andrew Broster: But you've just got to give them a really easy journey. If they can use Facebook or they can use Instagram, they should be able to use a CMS. It should be as simple as that. Ultimately, our goal is login.  In our world, it's, you've got three things. You've got a player, you've got media, and you've got to be able to publish it, and it shouldn't be more complicated than that because that's what the smaller clients want. They want to be able to schedule content and they want to be able to update content very easily.  Is there a particular market vertical that you guys are strong in? Is it retail or is it QSR?  Andrew Broster: It's a fight between the two at the moment. We're doing a lot more work with Elo, Micro Touch in the U.S. at the moment. So we are using Blue Star in the U.S. to sell through to the channel, and so QSR is an interesting space because of the Square integration. You can plug a square device in and a touch screen in and within 20 minutes you can have QSR running on a touch screen to be able to do the ordering. It's four clicks in our system. You authenticate against the Square, you choose your products and off you go. So that space for us is very exciting for us. In the retail side, I think predominantly because of the way we position our product for integrations into Nexomsphere and stuff like that, that makes it quite an attractive offering.  With kiosk, and point of sale, I don't know that world all that well, but, Square, I think about it as transaction processing. Do you still have to jack into a point of sale system or is that something you can provide?  Andrew Broster: No, we are ultimately like a silent salesman sitting there. So we're literally integrated straight into Square's APIs. We pull up the products and we're just another method of ordering. So we work and the integration works just like online ordering, but we're just presenting it on a pretty screen, which is touch enabled. So that integration for us Is key, but actually very simplistic  Because you're doing from what I can tell on the web, a lot of kinds of interactive work and use portrait screens to do that. I see most digital science platforms as being very distinctly oriented around landscape and large format displays that don't have interactive. Is it hard to straddle the two?  Andrew Broster: No, not really. At the end of the day, it's a player for us. We have customers who've got large LED screens which is great, works very well. I would say we're particularly strong in the portrait side of the world.  But at the end of the day, all this technology doesn't work without any content creators. So we've got some very nice strategic content partners that do all of this work, which worked very well with our systems integrators.  So you would just point to them when a customer asks, you say, “These guys can help you out?”  Andrew Broster: Yeah, so if they don't have it in house and we say look, sure, no problem. We've got three or four of our preferred content partners who are actually quite tech and web app enabled, so they like to do some of the experiential stuff which ultimately then boils back down into the Nexomsphere world. So there again, it's a nice blend.  I believe you got into this in part, to do the Sky thing, that at that point it was a system on chip displays. Is that accurate?  Andrew Broster: Yes. So Sky has a very close relationship with Samsung, and the remit was that they had to be a Samsung screen system on chip. Now we're going back to 2015-2016 models, the very first generation way before Tizen. So yeah, that was the requirement, and off the back of that, it was, which CMS vendor can support these screens? Because in those days, system on ships didn't support portraits. You had to do clever stuff to make the content play in portrait in those days. That was the reality of it, and then, yes, in those early days, it was Scala that we originally integrated into. Then once Chris Regal and Stratacash bought Scala, that was the end of Samsung and SoC, right?  Andrew Broster: It absolutely was. It was, I think the initial shock was, what do we do next? But as I said before, Sky came to us and said, look, we have to keep this advertising network running. We need it supported. We need a platform that can scale a lot further than it currently runs at the moment, and we welcome that challenge, really. Don't forget we, at the time we were only seven or eight strong, we're now nineteen strong straddling three countries. So we've grown up a lot since then, but for a company of that size at the time, it was quite a big challenge. One of the things that I've heard through the years with system on chip smart displays is as you alluded to when they first came out, they weren't very powerful, weren't very capable.  I heard, as subsequent generations came along, they got quite good, they got quite powerful, but more recently, I've heard the opposite that because of the demands that are out there now for end devices that they can't handle everything, that they don't have the processing power to maybe do stuff that has aspects of AI related to it or anything else. I'm curious about your experience.  Andrew Broster: I think if you look at it from a HD point of view, no issues, 4k, don't see any issues. We saw some early issues in around Tizen 4 particularly. So we're talking about three or four years ago. Tizen 6, 6. 5 and 7 have been reasonably good.  Don't forget, we now integrate using Nexomsphere controllers, we're doing a lot of work with LIDAR, with Nexomsphere as well and predominantly these Tizen screens, they're just very dependent, not only on the processor, but on the Chromium version. If you're running a screen that's running a four year old Chromium version, you're going to have a whole ball ache when it comes to doing some cool stuff. But the later the Chromium release, the more feature rich, it actually becomes.  So there's no issue handling the complexity of content?  Andrew Broster: No, we have thousands of Samsung screens on our estate. They are in our world probably the most reliable devices. I have heard that there's been a push lately amongst end users to go to independent standalone media players and to decouple from the displays and not be relying on them. Are you hearing that in the community?  Andrew Broster: Yep, we are.  What's driving that?  Andrew Broster: So just to summarize we support anything Tizen, let's just say anything Samsung WebOS. We support Linux, Windows, Pi5 as well but I wouldn't run an estate on a Pi5. We're seeing a lot of drive now down the Android route, and my background is security, and I've always had a huge aversion to going near Android players. But there are a couple of new parties involved in the market that we're starting to work with who are releasing what we call their own orchestration platform for supporting Android so they can roll out thousands of these devices, keep them updated, keep them online and healthy and I'm actually quite receptive to it because I've always been very allergic to it, but going back to your point, I think a lot of it is possibly some of the integration issues or some of the requirements for external devices to function.  It took us nearly two years to get Samsung to open a USB port for us. People don't hang around for two years just to be able to have an integration port, being able to have an external device using that, which natively support, is actually a huge stepping stone and a huge advantage.  Why is that?  Andrew Broster: Because there's no compatibility issues. if I have to keep going back to Samsung every time I want to be able to have another driver to support over USB, and they turn around and say, two years later, yeah, guys, we finally decided that there's a big enough opportunity in the market to do it. We will consider it. That's all well and good, but the smaller, external media player companies, can move a lot quicker than that.  Right. I did an event where I was supposed to be using Samsung kiosk for checkin…  Andrew Broster: Oh, don't I know it.  I just wanted to use a little thermal printer and they said, we don't have that because that needs a Windows driver and we don't have that, so too bad, so sad.  Andrew Broster: Yep, absolutely.  But just leave it at that.  Andrew Broster: Put it this way. I mean we support the Samsung Kiosk on Tizen. They have a barcode and QR scanner. Does it work? Not really. They have a printer. Does it work? Yes, but it's only that printer. You can't plug anything else in it and it'd be supported because the Tizen operating system doesn't support it. So it's hardly surprising that people just go out and say, actually life's so much easier if I just plug another device into it, because I just know that the peripherals of work, and that for me is probably the approach I'd look at too.  If I'm a large brand and I just want to roll out 1500s, let's call them devices, and then all of a sudden, the panel vendor says, no, we don't support that device. You can't wait for a decision to be made. You just got to get on with your project, and yes, that's a perfect space for media players.  Because you've now been in this industry for some time, but spent a lot of time looking at it, where do you think things are at? Because I see far too many software competitors out there and I'm always amazed when a small startup contacts me and says, we're doing this too, here's what we're up to, and I'm thinking, why did you start this? There's so many competitors to begin with.  What do you see and what will happen? Because I just see the herd being thinned out.  Andrew Broster: I think what I'm carefully observing at the moment is the number of acquisitions that are taking place. We see it, if we look at grass, fish and dice, and the aggregation and the buying up of what I look at as like the supply chain and ultimately trying to go direct.  I think that's for me, I think that opens more doors than it closes for us. Not only on the fact that, ultimately my business needs to have a value and it needs to be able to be, one day, I would like to walk away from this. From my point of view, looking at it and seeing one, competitor being swallowed up or acquired by systems integrators is a great thing. But two, it also leaves a very open to us because what then happens is you've got a UK based company buying from fragments like a what was a European digital signage software platform who's now actually realistically going to become a direct competitor because they will then start competing in the same space for the same customer base. For me, that's great. We get calls quite regularly saying, oh yeah, but yeah, we can't buy those licenses anymore because they're now a competitor. The board won't approve it.  So from my point of view, it's great, and it's exciting, and for us, we're picking up new businesses as a result of it. What I'm seeing, which I'm quite enjoying at the moment is a lot of the hype around retail media. I did a podcast couple of weeks ago about it, with one of our systems integrators. Chris Regal is doing a great job of talking and educating the market. I think his insights are very valuable. I have a lot of respect for Chris. I have done all of these, even going back to when he acquired Scala, but I haven't yet seen a very good implementation of a retail media network. I don't travel the globe every day, but I do a fair amount of travel. But I think really for my business and other businesses our side, the retail media side of it is purely targeted messaging, ultimately, if you want me to look at it that way. I don't think that's exciting. Who would you describe as a good partner company and a channel to work with, because there are some integrators who I tend to call solutions providers because they truly understand it versus AV systems integrators who are really good at deploying stuff in workplaces and other kinds of spaces like that, but they don't understand content, they don't understand the software. They just put stuff in.  Andrew Broster: Yeah, hang and bang as I call it.  Yeah. I don't like to use that term because they don't like it, but that's...  Andrew Broster: There's no disrespect. Yeah, to it, to any of those guys, everybody has their business model, right? We have this really nice blend of very sophisticated system integrators down to the ones that just want to look after the smaller end users, and they're as valuable to us as anybody, because we give them tools that they just go in and plug in and exercise. That's an easy route for us really, because we were selling a box product with an add on, and they can go in and install a box product with an add on and it's just two pieces of software for us. That's perfect.  I think about end users and the enterprise level ones often wanting a fully managed solution where, look, we're going to outsource this thing to you guys, we'll give you direction and everything else, what we need, but you guys do it.  Are you also seeing that with some of your channel partners that even relatively small deployments, they want that full managed solution?  Andrew Broster: We are, and we're seeing more and more of it, and that's exactly where our systems integrators sit in that space, and that's great. More and more to be honest with you, I think, we saw years ago, like everybody wanting to move to the cloud and just push the problem away and trying to lower the cost of IT systems, right?  I think what they're also trying to do now, certainly in the marketing side of these brands, is they want to be able to push that out and just know it's going to be looked after. It's easier to have a fully managed service for the systems integrator that has a help desk, a support system, people on the ground, technical experts and the partners that we work with, they're all certified Evexi Partners.  We get maybe two or three calls a week from an escalation point of view with something, but the rest of it is handled by our systems integrators.  That's a good situation.  Andrew Broster: I always look at it erctainly the channel is we're like the software guys, we're not the help desk guys. We're the guys that want to build the software, look after the software and release more features in the software. The systems integrators are great at looking after the customer, supporting the customer and delivering everything to the customer. We fit in quite nicely.  So it's either two things. Everything's going well, or they've given up on you.  Andrew Broster: No, it's not, because I keep buying licenses, and that's a good thing.  Absolutely. I believe you have a busy next few weeks coming up here. You're at NRF and then ISE. Andrew Broster: Yeah. So we're at four trade shows in the space of four months. Next year we are with our partner's Ergonomic Solutions, NRF, which will be great, really looking forward to that. Our US market footprint's growing, so we're enjoying that relationship, Blue Star is an integral part of that. We enjoy working with those guys.  ISE, again, the Ergonomic's stand, we're showcasing a lot of new tech. So a lot of it is nice integrations with Nexomsphere as well. A lot of touch applications, experiential stuff. We're on the Nexomsphere stand with them as one of their supporting partners and we're on the Samsung stand, and then at the end of February, we go to Eurosys, which I find fascinating because it's a very different market and it's very retail focused. So we're there for a week and then we're at the Retail Tech Show again, and we'll be supporting three or four of our UK partners as well as Ergonomic Solutions as well at the Retail Tech Show. So it's a very busy beginning to the year.  All right. I will let you get organized for all that. Thank you for taking some time with me.  Andrew Broster: No problem at all. Thank you very much for having me.

Just prior to DSE, I was in Palm Springs to take part in an executive retreat for the digital signage crowd, organized and run by my friends at invidis, the consultancy and publishing company based in Munich. They have done these events in Europe for a few years now: an invitation-based two-day gathering that is part networking, part knowledge-sharing and part R&R - from golf to cocktails. I was along because they needed some eye candy, and there was probably also a California mandate to include a senior citizen. But Florian and Stefan from invidis had me there, as well, to do some interviews with attendees. It was a bit like herding cats because of the size of the resort, and varying schedules, but we managed to trap eight attendees in front of the camera and mikes. There are video versions you can watch, but for those who like to listen to interviews as they walk or drive (I've even heard swimming!), here's the second of two round-ups, with four interviews in each. This one has: Jeremy Gavin of Screenfeed; Shawn O'Connell, who recently joined Uniguest; Stan Richter of SignageOS; And Trey Courtney of Mood Media.

Just prior to DSE, I was in Palm Springs to take part in an executive retreat for the digital signage crowd, organized and run by my friends at invidis, the consultancy and publishing company based in Munich. They have done these events in Europe for a few years now: an invitation-based two-day gathering that is part networking, part knowledge-sharing and part R&R - from golf to cocktails. I was along because they needed some eye candy, and there was probably also a California mandate to include a senior citizen. But Florian and Stefan from invidis had me there, as well, to do some interviews with attendees. It was a bit like herding cats because of the size of the resort, and varying schedules, but we managed to trap eight attendees in front of the camera and mikes. There are video versions you can watch, but for those who like to listen to interviews as they walk or drive (I've even heard swimming!), here's the first of two round-ups, with four interviews in each. This one has: Frank Pisano from Bluefin Bryan Meszaros of OpenEye Global George Clopp of Korbyt and the baritone, no mike needed, voice of IV Dickson of SageNet.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Sensors and triggered content have been part of digital signage for probably 20 years, but they weren't widely used for a lot of that time because putting a solution together involved a lot of planning and custom electronics. A Dutch company called Nexmosphere has changed all that, offering a wide range of different sensors that trigger content to digital signage screens by sensing the presence of people or reacting to an action, like someone lifting a product up from shelf to get a better look. Nexmosphere has developed its own set of low-cost custom sensors and controllers that make it fast and easy for digital signage solutions companies, including pure-play CMS software shops, to add triggered content capabilities. Nexmosphere focuses on the hardware and makes an API available to partners. I chatted with CEO Hubert van Doorne about the company's roots and how his customers are now using sensors to drive engagement in retail. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Thank you for joining me. Can you give listeners a rundown on what Nexmosphere is all about?  Hubert van Doorne: Oh, yes. I'd love to do that. Nexomsphere is all about sensors for digital signage and to make any digital signage system interactive and by interactive, we do not mean only by pressing a button or touching something on a screen, but it's much more of letting the digital signage installation respond to actually the person in front of it. So it can be a presence sensor. It can be something that you touch or lift the product and that way make an interactive system at Nexmosphere, build a platform of a lot of different sensors that can be hooked up easily to the system and in that way for the system integrator and really help in building this sort of system. It's something that's been done for decades by a lot of companies who made their own sensors so in that case, it's not real rocket science, but the beauty of the product is that you can take any of these sensors, bring them together and you don't need any development time to have a proof of concept running and I think that's the real strong point of what we offer.  Yeah, I've been in this sector for a very long time, and I can remember, when I was working with one company, we had a guy who I think worked out of a motor home somewhere in Arizona or California or something like that, and he would design boards that could be used for very early iterations of sensor-based detection, presence sensor, that sort of thing, but it was a lot of work and there was nothing off the shelf that you could buy to do all that. I suspect that there's a whole bunch of companies that said, “Oh, thank God, I can just order this and it's already sorted out.”  Hubert van Doorne: Exactly. It's actually also how the company started in 2015. We were a part of a display company making POS materials for in-store and we developed our own sensor set for Sonos and for Philips to go into the European stores, but what we saw is that the number of stores was heavily declining and the complexity of every system was really growing. So we needed something modular that was not just for one group of displays. We needed something for five thousand, you could make the same part of electronics, but now we need it for 200 stores, something still affordable to build, and that's how the idea started off of making a more standard solution that you can plug and play. And, first, when we came to the market, everybody was like, “No, we will build something ourselves, that's much easier.” But then, over time you saw these numbers of installations decline. concept stores would only be maybe five stores or ten stores and then slowly evolve over time and that was getting difficult to make something really solid, and robust in small numbers. So that's where we really saw that the companies coming to us. Like indeed, what you say, thank you, you're developing this because it's only a very small part of the total installation cost and compared to a screen or a media player, we are only a fraction of the cost, but it's adding a lot of functionality. So in the end, if it's not working, it's a problem. but it's also not something where you can really save a lot of money because it's only a small part of the budget.  When you say it's a small part of the budget, are we talking tens of dollars or tens of euros or hundreds of euros on a typical installation?  Hubert van Doorne: It depends, but if you go for a presence sensor by screen, you have it over, $40-$50 a sensor. So that's only a few percent of the total installation, and of course, we go also to museum experiences where we have 20-40 sensors in one set, and then maybe you go to a few thousand euros, but in the end, it's never a very expensive set of gear, because, in the end, it's just small electronic bits that you can very well pick the right size that you need for your project. So there's very little that you do not use in the end.  What's the range of types of sensors that you do?  Hubert van Doorne: In terms of applications, we have a couple of real main areas and the first one is absolutely by far present sensing and its presence and motion. So if someone is in front of a display, if he's approaching or moving across or where he is exactly standing that sort of application, but it's very much based on seeing where a person is and depending on where he or she stands, trigger the content or just for statistics, counting how many people are there. And, the second, large area is what we call lift and learn. So if you pick up a product you can actually display information about this product over video, because we know which product's being lifted. Typically we have about seven different technologies that can lift and learn. So we have a lot of different sensors for different products, but in the end, it is all for the same application of building a lift and learning. Another bigger area is LED lighting which you use as guidance. So a third area that we do is, guidance where you really can guide people, for example, in a museum, where to look if you light up an exhibit, but it can also be in a cosmetic store. If you have different products and you make your selection on, for example, a tablet light up the products that match this selection. So LED lighting, it's not so much a sensor, it's more an actuator, but that's what we do a lot as well, and the fourth, biggest pillar is what we call UI elements and that's anything to do with, for example, normal push buttons, but it can also be air buttons so that you just hold your hand somewhere on a position very close to the screen and it already triggers so you don't have to really touch, air gesture that you can do with your hand in the air. That's all elements where you really want the user to do an interaction with the screen that is not on a touch screen and those elements, that's another important group of sensors. And then we have a lot of small, little special sensors. They're fun, but it's not the big chunk. Did you find as you were growing the company that you started adding these things because people were asking about it or you just saw that people are struggling with understanding where to look next and so on… so let's use LEDs to light guide them?  Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. Of course, we had already very early clients who helped us also. By asking the right things like, “Hey, this is something we could really use. So can you build something for us?” But also looking at ourselves, we have a very strong team, with a lot of ideas where they really look at what is needed now in the market and how we can find a technology that can really be well suited to do this and I think that's also a little bit where we differentiate ourselves from others.  You do have great industry sensors. They are very expensive. They are very good but, for larger rollouts, and larger deployments, they are far too expensive to make a big rollout or too complex. Yeah, you have the cheap stuff, but in the end, it's also not something that can really scale because you cannot really adjust them exactly how you have to use them in mainly a retail environment, but also we see them now in more and other environments where if you use too many standard sensors then you cannot customize to how it should behave in that area and you can also get a lot of misreads and I think that's the strong point of our sensors that we really build something that you just connect and it works in that retail environment.  A good example I always give is a presence sensor. We had a competition using exactly the same chipset from ST Microelectronics, but the fact that somebody walked in front of it and there was a minimum timing of a few milliseconds. A person should be there for half a second because otherwise a person cannot appear in half of a fraction of a second and be gone again but if you have a very fast sensor and you think, oh yeah, that was a person you also have to look at the application. It's not in a shopping center that somebody comes in and then a half second is gone again. So that must be a misread somewhere from the sensor, and that's how you very cleverly can filter how sensors should work, and I think that that's why we really make them for the, we call retail environment. That's our main application area, and if you want to use it in other areas there, it will work as well, but retail is just a very harsh environment where it should always work. Are these devices that you're somewhat buying off the shelf, so to speak, or are you pretty much going down to the wood and designing these from scratch and sourcing the different components and maybe designing your own PCB and so on?  Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, it's a good question. All PCB design is completely done by ourselves, but the actual sensor is often a technology that we use. It's a standard chipset available from one of the big manufacturers like Sharp or anyone who makes real sensors for the industry where we take just the sensor chip part, put it on our own PCB, and really make it a solution that fits the digital signage market.   So do you have contract manufacturing that makes this stuff over in Shenzhen or somewhere or are you doing that in the Netherlands?  Hubert van Doorne: Some of our PCB manufacturing or most of our PCB manufacturing itself is done in China but we also have some clients who prefer the European stamp. So for some of the products, the PCBs are also made in Europe, and then end assembly and end-of-line testing are all done in the Netherlands. So that is where we really make the product and put all the software on and package it as a final product.  If you look at the qualification, most of the products are really made in the Netherlands. It's not that we have a contract manufacturer somewhere in China who builds our complete box. We want to have that control at the end still in the Netherlands.  Yeah. So you're definitely not just rebadging something that's made for the China market and client your own?  Hubert van Doorne: No, absolutely not. For this, it would also be a little bit too complex. I have to say, of course, some accessories like cables or that sort of thing is of course, the standard stuff we sell, we do not make anything nonspecial ourselves, but all the sensor part controllers, everything that's, that's true, including if you look to the products, all the casings, everything is our own design. You mentioned presence detection. Can you work with computer vision platforms and drive analytics, or is it very kind of basics, sensing the saying, “In an hour, these many people appear to be in front of the display?”  Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, we do a little bit different than computer vision. I think honestly the computer vision guys are making great products. The only problem often is that you cannot put a camera or it's something that needs to be calibrated to the space. Typically our sensors are something that you can just drop in the space and it will start working and also on a different price point, but if you look, what we can provide is that we can see if there's someone in front of the sensor and we can measure the distance on a, like a centimeter-accurate. So we know it's a half inch where someone exactly stands and if she, for example, now moving towards display or moving away we get all this trigger data delivered to the digital signage player. And with third parties, partners of ours, for example, you can have beautiful dashboards that can give you insights like, “This was the opportunity to see” and “So many people engaged with the product.” There you can see a complete dashboard exactly at that time of the day. It was busier because, in this area, more people were standing at that sort of statistics we could easily provide them.  Yeah, for many years I have wondered about computer vision, the applicability for a lot of digital signage applications, this idea that you're going to serve content based on the demographic profile of who's in front of the screen. It just didn't hit me as something that would ever be done very much, and I'm curious if your customers and partners generally find that, you know what, just having a sense of how many people the opportunity to see and so on is more than enough. We don't need to get that granular. We don't need to micro-target individual viewers. Hubert van Doorne: I would say if you talk to the advertising companies, it's sort of the holy grail and they're all looking for the solution, and it's not that it's not coming, but it's also the question of how would you target your audience and I think that's something that's being asked a lot, but if you see what is the technology needed for it, and if I see how far digital signage is now off still often, not even, if you see just in the store, like looping content, yeah, you could already be much more responsive than just looping content. And that's also not being done. So before we leap into light years ahead of what we could do, and yes, technically we can do, but if, for example, already the advertisers have problems delivering the right content at the right time, this becomes something very, time-sensitive to really have it in an auction platform and very quickly delivered. So for sure, it's something where, slowly the whole advertising market will go, but I personally do not have the feeling that it will very quickly come into large deployments.  Yeah. People are still freaked out about the idea of a camera being on them, even though there are cameras all over a store watching for security reasons. Hubert van Doorne: Yeah. But it's also about how would you like to use it. I think showing content at the relevant position. There was once a client and this was many years ago, but it was about in-store materials and he was a manufacturer of cat food. So he says, “If somebody is in front of the shelf with all the cat food, that's the perfect moment to advertise because I know my customer is a cat owner, or at least someone who wants to feed the cat, and if he's male, female, and their age” and I think that's a very relevant thing.  If you look into a store layout or for all the media advertising in the store if you know where the shoppers are already in the store, you can also tell a lot about what would be relevant content to show and that it's not only based on age demographics or demographics like male, female. I think that's something typically the advertisers do to slice the market and spice up the market. But I think there are different ways to do that in a very elegant way as well.  Are you competing with touch or is it just another approach? Hubert van Doorne: I think we work well together with touch even. I think we are hyper-focused on the sensor market, and that's the same, as what I say about computer vision. I think they make lovely products and also people who do mobile phone tracking, and it's a huge market of all kinds of inputs and sensors you can do and a lot of manufacturers have great touch screens, and I think what we do is just add another layer of possibilities of sensing something that can work well together.  There's a bit of an orchestration to some of these experiences, right? if you have presence sensing, you can be 10 feet away and you might get one message if you're closer. If you move closer to a screen, it can trigger a different message and maybe guide them using the LED light bars and things like that. It seems to me I've seen demos of this when I've walked through your stand at shows like ISE.  Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, that's definitely the presence sensor can just be to make something different than a looping video. I always say for the presence sensor, it's the same as reading a book. I would like to start on page one, and if you want to tell a story to your customer, why are you starting somewhere in the middle? Because it's a looping video. You will never be synchronized. If somebody approaches the screen, it'll always be in the wrong spot. And I think with a presence sensor, you can have a nice triggering content that really attracts the people to come close to the screen, and when they're close and when they are in range, I would say you can start firing your message and have your story being told. A nice thing about the sensor is that you can actually time how long is the person standing in front. and is he watching the whole advert or is he halfway moving away? And that comes to another thing that you can very nicely do is, of course, the A/B testing. If you have different content, you can say, hey, with this content, just where the end is a little bit longer and a little bit more flashy, people stay six seconds longer, so this is better content to show. So in that way, you can really optimize your content and your message by measuring how long people are looking and how can we improve.  Now, if I'm a CMS software company, or a retail solutions company of some description, if I want to do that, am I having to write the software to create that experience, or is that somewhat templated or available within your end of the solution?  Hubert van Doorne: That's a very good question. Technically we are a hardware provider. So the only thing we do is deliver the hardware that's capable of delivering triggers to the media player, and that can be over USB or over network or RS22 and we deliver that trigger message, and then you need a CMS that can actually really sense what to do with the trigger and there's absolutely no software from our side. It's just then the software of the CMS where you can, really in that UI setup like, for example, in a BrightSign, you have Bright Author, and then you can select from a list like, If sensor three is triggered, then I want to start video number five and when this is done, I want to have that started. So that's something that can be done via the CMS.  I noticed on your website that you have three kinds of distinctions or tiers or whatever or partners. You've got full partners. You've got fully compatible and then partially compatible. What's the distinction between them?  Hubert van Doorne: It's a very good one. We are still missing the official explanation on the website. So we'll add that over time, but no, maybe good to start with our partners that are really strong partners in the industry where we often exhibit together, we do trade shows together and we do projects together where we really team up and make something work for the integrator as a complete set. So that's our real industry partners.  There are also a lot of CMSs that deliver a nice software solution, but in the end, we are not very closely working with them together, but the application works well and that's where we say it's a compatible CMS. So that means that all functionality will work, but we don't know that many details about the CMS. So if you want to know how our solution will work with that CMS, best to contact the CMS and they can tell you more about how the integration works because we cannot keep track of 50 different CMSs, how they all work, and how they all work in detail. Lately, we added the partially compatible and that's the reason that we have a few that do a lovely integration on two or three of our sensors, and it's a very nice UI where you can set everything, but it's not working with every sensor. It's just, for example, our few popular sensors where it does work with, and they say yeah, but we can easily make a widget for this client and then it can work with any sensor, yeah, but it's not something that you can just connect and it just will work. So we say, with these companies, it does work, but for some specific centers. So please watch out and contact the company if you want to use it for this specific specific sensor, and ask them if it's working. So that's why we made these three different tiers. These sensors are generally very small, and in a lot of cases, you would never even know they're there, right?  Hubert van Doorne: Exactly.  Is that by design, a necessity even? Or is it just that's the state of miniaturization where you can do that?  Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, I would say the fact that you can make it very small is because it's retail, nobody wants to see tech. So the more you can hide it, the better it is, and yeah, I think we make quite a big effort to make the sensors as small as possible because they are much easier to integrate. So yeah, I think there are some options where you can have more bulky systems, but we always try to make them as small as possible. I've spent quite a bit of time lately talking to different display manufacturers and R&D companies about emerging displays, and one of the things I talk about is with stuff like micro LED, there will be a time when you'll be able to include a sensor right within the display. So just because the pixels are so small, you could put a sensor device in there as well. So you're not just looking at a screen, you're also looking at something that can do some degree of sensing.  Have you started to look at that at all, or is that just out there somewhere?  Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, we do see that, I think I can take a parallel to a couple of years ago. We were quite growing big in the room booking systems that we did little LED strips that you could add to the system and then you saw the first screens popping up where they had the little LED strips integrated, and we are not selling any LED strips anymore for booking. That's just where the industry goes. But I don't see that as a bad thing, because I think, for example, if Samsung decides to add a presence sensor in every one of their screens, then that's the next step where we say okay, then maybe our sales of single presence sensors will go down, but there are other sensors again, where you would like to measure again.  So I think it's sort of the same as you see media players integrating into screens. If people are using it a lot, it makes sense to make it in one unit. I'm happy to see that everything gets less complex and is being integrated into one unit, and I think it's more our job to, for all those things that cannot go into super high volume, that there is space in every screen, then maybe you need a present sense or just looking at a different angle then right in front of the screen. That will be something that's never added to the screen. because it's a typical application.  There are two components, right? There's the sensors and then there's controllers. How does that break down and do you need both? Obviously you need the sensors.  Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, and you do need the controllers. What we did with our hardware structure is that we have a lot of sensors and they all come back to the same little connector. It's what we call Xtalk and it's like a mini USB, and that's actually every sensor can be hooked into any controller, and then the different controllers we have is just to oversee the whole system setup and to have one, yeah, let's say a sort of USB hub where you have one communication channel to the media player and our controller is then, really doing the power supply for all sensors, seeing what's connected and being the host the communicator to the media player.  And we have different controls because for example, for something like LED lighting, you can get a controller with an LED driver already embedded on board, so it makes it much easier to control LED strips and the same for example for audio switching and we have a lot of different controllers that have different functionalities built in just to make it more easy and have it integrated in one system.  How do you know if everything's behaving as it's supposed to?  Hubert van Doorne: It's a good question. The nice thing is that our system, our controller is completely monitoring all sensors and the system integrator can also always see if all sensors are online even exact serial numbers and everything that's connected.  It looks like very simple tech, but in the end, you can, within a dashboard, for example, completely monitor your system health and see even if somebody is plugging something in a different port. You can already see that the system's setup has changed. So that's how we can monitor and see if something is not working or needs attention over time. That's something that's really needed if you do large-scale rollouts, and I think, yeah, everything we build is just made for maintaining it or giving it a possibility to roll out in big volume. Is that your device management dashboard, this is purely an API that you can integrate into a system integrator or whatever.  Hubert van Doorne: It's just the API where we deliver that, and we have then our partners that can deliver you a complete dashboard already that you don't have to build something yourself, but if you have the as a system integrator, I want to build my own dashboard, you're free to use our API and you don't need any license. Then it's just free. You buy our hardware and there's no license cost.  Is there an emerging kind of tech that you're now looking at that you think you can add to the stack or could be a big deal like lift and learn and presence sensing has been around for a very long time. People who've been in this industry and doing retail solutions understand it, but is there new stuff coming?  Hubert van Doorne: Not so much on the sensor part. For example, last year, we added weight sensors also for lift and learning so it's a completely different technology. Radar technologies are improving. So yes, we always continuously monitor what's available and there will be new additions, but I think that will not be complete wow in the industry now there is the Holy Grail that this is possible. It will be just additions over time.  What we do see is that there is a very strong appetite for green signage products and what we will do is next year we will launch a new product in that area so that we can also deliver to more verticals than only the retail and experiences as we become more and more interested in other verticals.  I was curious about digital signage. If you work in the industry, you think it's quite a big industry, but in relative terms, it's quite small and narrow. Is there enough of a business for you just within digital signage, or is it important to branch out?  Hubert van Doorne: No, I think it's definitely big enough for digital signage now because there's almost hardly any competition. I always say our biggest competitor is no sensor. So in a project somewhere that the sensor is being skipped, but, it is fast growing and I think digital signage itself is growing, but I think also you see much more areas where it becomes, yeah, it's a discussion, is it digital signage or, it's a screen somewhere in an area, if you call it digital signage or not, we see more and more screens coming up and more and more data becoming available in the digital world.  So I think, yes, the number of screens will be quite growing in the next few years and I think, there's a very big market we can service.  Yeah, I've written a number of times and talked to, or when I've done talks with companies, about what I call boring signage and the idea of using sensors that maybe you would think about for parking garages and available stalls and so on, and using that in airports for very busy restrooms and things like that to have displays out front that kind of give you the state of availability of that.  It sounds dumb, but I think it's incredibly valuable and again, it's just applying sensors in a creative way.  Hubert van Doorne: Oh, yeah, and we see regularly that our sensors are being used in completely different order verticals. So your toilet example is one where they used our sensors, and even to see if the bin is full in the restroom. So it's not that we are not able to provide those markets. It's only that we communicate and we read the development for the retail space.  But yeah, you will see more and more areas opening up where it becomes interesting and, that's something we definitely can branch out of, over, over time as well. For the moment, we are really focused on the retail space because I think there's a lot to win still, but yeah, the sensor technology will go not to retail or experience centers only.  Retail gives you scale too that you don't necessarily get with washroom solutions.  Hubert van Doorne: No, and I think very important is that, in the retail space, data is hugely important for AI to see. How can I do my shopper assortment? How can I see how people are behaving in the store? And actually by providing the sensors that can really measure.  We have, for example, now a retailer in the UK that's only using the sensors to see how people are moving in front of the shelf. There's not even digital signage anymore, and I think, that gives the importance of knowing what people are doing, that they want to deploy a system in more than a hundred stores to measure to just see how they can improve and make better operation. You're in Eindhoven?  Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, that's right.  How big is the company at this point?  Hubert van Doorne: At this point, we are only a very small group. We are around 25 staff and now slowly growing our sales team as we see the market really starting to develop before it was a lot of interest and smaller projects and sometimes a bigger rollout of 500 stores or something, but now you really see, since last year volume coming in and that's really nice that we can now scale and now we are really from the sometime away from the startup and now a scale-up. So that's also where it will happen with the staff in the same way.  You mentioned being involved with another company back in 2015? Are you completely a private company or do you have ties to a larger firm?  Hubert van Doorne: No, it's a completely privately owned company. At that time, we were part of a display company, but that one stopped in business and this was completely carved out as an individual company and it's completely independently operating. If people want to find out more, they get you on nexomsphere.com? Hubert van Doorne: Yes, that's the perfect place to start, and if there's any question, please reach out to one of our team members or the emails. We are like not all companies always, but we are responsive to our emails, and we like to help people with any question they have because that's the first step in exploring what sensors can do. You're at ISE, right?  Hubert van Doorne: Of course, and that will be really exciting with some new products. You should not miss as an integrator, even if you're not interested in the retail space. So I would definitely see common visitors.  All right. Thank you for spending some time with me.  Hubert van Doorne: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Have a great day.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There are not a lot of companies that have been involved in what we now call digital signage for 44 years, but Videotel has been selling technology that puts marketing information on screens since 1980. The company started with VCRs (younger readers may have to Google that) and then started designing, manufacturing and selling DVD players that, unlike consumer devices, would happily play out a set of repeating video files for weeks, months and years. Back in the days before fast internet connections, cloud computing and small form factor PCs, that's how a lot of what we now know as digital signage was done. About 14 years ago, the San Diego-area company added dedicated, solid state digital signage media players - and that product line has steadily grown to include networked and interactive versions. The company also now has interactive accessories for stuff like lift and learn, and directional speakers that help drive experiences in everything from retail to museums. I had a good conversation with Lisa Schneider, who runs sales and marketing, and Travis McMahand, Videotel's CTO. We get into the company's roots, the evolution to solid state media players, and how Videotel successfully competes with $400 and higher players, when at least part of the buyer market seems driven mostly by finding devices that are less than $100. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Thank you for joining me. Can you introduce yourselves and tell me what Videotel is all about?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, absolutely. Hello, Dave. Thank you for having both Travis and me today. We appreciate it. My name is Lisa Schneider and I am the executive vice president for sales and marketing for our company, Videotel Digital. We were founded in 1980. Gosh, it's been almost 44 years now, back when we were manufacturing top-loading VCRs, that went into industrial-grade DVD players, and now in the last 14 years, we are manufacturing digital signage media players. We have interactive solutions that include various sensors like motion sensors, proximity sensors, and weight sensors. We've got mechanical LED push buttons and touchless IR buttons and RFID tags, and things like that that create interactive displays. We also provide directional audio speakers. We have various form factors for all types of projects, and then we also have Travis on the line with us. I'll let Travis introduce himself.  Travis McMahand: Oh, hi, I'm Travis McMahand I am the CTO of Videotel Digital.  Where's the company based? Is it in San Diego?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, we are in, it's San Diego. It's actually Chula Vista, borderline San Diego. So in California.  San Diego area.  Lisa Schneider: Yes, San Diego area. Beautiful San Diego.  So I've been aware of your company forever and going all the way back to the days when you were doing industrial grade, commercially oriented DVD players. In the early days of digital science before things were networked, that's what people were using and if you used a regular DVD player or even a VCR or something like that, the thing was really not set up to play over and over again if you were using just like a consumer-grade device. So the whole idea was you were, you guys developed commercial-grade versions that were rated to last, for days, weeks, months, years. Is that accurate?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, that is accurate, and it was, that was our flagship product back in the day. That was because we made a truly industrial-grade player and it would auto power on, auto seamlessly loop and repeat without any manual interaction, even without a remote. So it was a looping player.  We actually still have three different types of industrial-grade DVD players that we still offer. They're actually really popular in healthcare facilities because they are specifically UL-approved for medical DVD players still, and they are still out there and, we are still producing them.  The attraction for that at the time was that just the absence of really networked media players unless you were quite sophisticated and were using big box PCs and everything else, I assume that market with the exception of what you're saying about Hospitals is largely gone away? Lisa Schneider: It hasn't been, for example, like sometimes with waiting rooms, people are still using DVDs for movies, for entertainment purposes, not just in healthcare. Sometimes there are still people who are self-burned content for museums. It's just simple for them to just throw the disc in and then they walk away and it just continuously loops. So they're still out there.  It's not completely gone away and we are one of the only ones left though that is still really providing the industrial grade DVD players. You said about 14 years ago, you got into digital signage media players that were not based on DVDs, it was based on hard drives or solid-state storage. Lisa Schneider: Yes, we started with solid state media players that were just simply looping off of an SD card or USB, no network connection, none of the fancy stuff, and that was really kind of the migration from the DVD, because people didn't want to use DVDs anymore. They just wanted to upload their content, do the same thing, load them, and go. So we probably still have a few versions of just solid-state players. That's how we entered the market. But one of the really cool things we did was we made one of them interactive, which, that's where we come into the interactive solutions, which we can talk about too.  The primary products that you have now are network-connected, right? Lisa Schneider: We have both. We still have solid-state digital signage players, for those simple needs, and then we do have networked players as well.  I'm thinking there's an awful lot of cases like retail marketing for brands for product launches and things like that, where, yes, you could use a network digital signage player, but it's loading up a set of files at the start and that's really all it's ever going to use, right?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, that's a lot of the use cases, where they just want to upload the content and let it go but there are obviously use cases where the content is ever-changing and they can push out content on our remote players, network players, via quick push. Do you have device management? Will you know what's going on with these devices, as they're out in a big box or whatever?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, one of our new player, we actually just did a press release on it for our VP92 4K network player. It will allow customers to use our free embedded software on the player that will allow them to push out the content remotely and that they can see what is being played in the various locations, wherever the box is deployed to, and then if it's just a single unit or hundreds of units if it's up in the thousands, then we recommend our cloud-based CMS software where they can manage, do all the management within the software itself. So you have your own software, but I'm assuming you're not selling yourself as a software company?  Lisa Schneider: No, we are not selling ourselves as a software company. We have hardware and then we have various software options. But it is embedded in the players to make it extremely simple to use. And it's tuned specifically for your devices.  Lisa Schneider: Correct. Yes.  Can a third-party CMS company, a CMS software company use your boxes?  Lisa Schneider: Travis that might be a good question for you to answer.  Travis McMahand: That's a possibility. We design our players to be simple and reliable. We don't make it so difficult to set up a program, so in doing that, we've hidden or disabled, certain features within the operating system. But we can still work with companies if they have a specific application or service that they want to use. We can definitely work with companies to try to make that happen.  Okay, so I guess a scenario would be something like a retailer or even a brand that has networks in stores and is using a CMS for the big displays for retail marketing and they say, we would like to use your stuff for the interactive or whatever, can we use the same platform to manage both of them? Travis McMahand: Yeah, that's a possibility. It goes on a case-by-case basis.  It's not something you're actively marketing, but technically you could do it if it makes sense for both sides, right?  Lisa Schneider: Absolutely, Dave. That's what I'd like to interject. We're open to those conversations with anybody who is interested, especially if it is a larger project is something I would entertain.  The hardware sector has been a tough one for a lot of the companies that have media players, with maybe the notable exception of BrightSign, which has a very big footprint everywhere, but the PC guys in particular, struggled to, in recent years, get relevance, and a lot of that seems to be driven by a race to the bottom to see how low we can go in terms of cost for a media player, and we now have Amazon with a custom build or kind of a stripped-out build of its Fire Sticks that are $99.  Has it been a challenge to compete with that stuff or, do you operate differently or have a different market? Lisa Schneider: That's a great question, and yes, I did see that new Amazon $99 Fire Stick. But we're very unique in a sense where, sure you can purchase a $99 player, but is it really industrial grade? Is it going to seamlessly auto-loop? Is it reliable? Can you connect interactive devices to it? Can you grow within it?  So it is a challenge in some aspects of it. But it seems that the ones that go, the customers that choose that route, end up circling back and they want more. It wasn't enough. The price was good, but then they realized, if we invest a little bit more, we're getting all of these things that we can grow into. And your media playout boxes, they look like they're industrial grade, ruggedized. They've got what looks like heat sinks or things like that built into it. Are these designs done in Chula Vista and then you have contracts manufacturer over in Asia?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, spot on. We design our own players in-house, and then we have them made, and we have a stringent process and a bunch of design engineers that are just constantly trying to break things, and they do a really good job of it, and we are very careful as to what we put out in the market and that is what also makes us unique.  And that allows you to sell at a higher price point because you have people looking at it and going, okay, I get why I'm paying more for this.  Lisa Schneider: Yeah, absolutely. We're not just relabeling some cheapo boxes. This is something that is designed in-house and these are the features, and we are able to get a little bit more because we are using premium parts during the manufacturing process and other other reasons as well, not just for the hardware. Travis, is it your own operating system or are you running on some kind of flavor of Linux?  Travis McMahand: The base operating system is Android. We use Android and just build off of that, build our apps within it, and set up all of the settings exactly the way we want.   Has that been that from the start or did you evolve into Android? Travis McMahand: Oh, we evolved into Android. We originally started when we first were doing players that were playing content just from USB and SD cards. It was really simple at that point and we were doing our own operating system. embedded operating system within the player at that point.  But then when we wanted to start adding more features and opening up the platform to more types of files, we found that using an Android-based operating system was much easier and more reliable to get going.  When I look at your customer list, it's impressive. You've got a whole bunch of interesting customers, a lot of them appear to be attractions, museums, that sort of thing, some brands, and so on. How would you describe, Lisa, your core customer base?  Lisa Schneider: I would say our core customer base is going to be in the retail space, museums, trade shows and events, and probably hotels, if I had to go down the list, but, we have just about everybody from food and beverage to restaurants, people use our players for menu boards, a lot of kiosks. We do healthcare, dentist offices, med spas, we're into transit on buses and bus stations. Just like the list goes on, but I would say those would probably be our top.  Because you have these ruggedized boxes, is it advantageous that you are in the San Diego area as opposed to on the other side of the Pacific in terms of, there are companies that also sell small form factor, ruggedized media, and play-out boxes that are in Taiwan or China. But the challenge you sometimes have is the time zones and language.  Lisa Schneider: Yeah, we make it known that we are in the States, obviously we wanted to serve the US, but also we can maintain and manage the international business as well. But yeah, it's just was like just evolved in that way.  You sell direct or do you have channels and distribution?  Lisa Schneider: Great question. We do both. We sell directly more to the small business owners, and then most of our business is through integrators and the reseller channel. Why did they come your way? We covered it, but I'm still curious about the pitch when you get asked, why you?  Lisa Schneider: Yeah, why Videotel? We've been around for 44 years, and we have experience. One of the big things is we really do listen to our customers. The word gets out, we offer free customer support and free technical support. You get a live person on the phone. Our customers are constantly, it's funny how they say, gosh, thank you for calling me back. It's “does so and so not call you back?” So they love us for those reasons and that we do offer industrial-grade equipment. It lasts and thank goodness the rumor is out there that we make solid products.  I'm also curious about how you get the manufacturing done. Do you have somebody located in China or wherever it is?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, we do. We have a team of people that are in China that we've actually had relationships for, gosh, I think 15 years now and so it's a very solid relationship. It makes it so much easier to communicate, and then they're the interface to all of the manufacturing that goes on. So there's our front lines there and it makes it a lot easier for us. Are your deployments, I guess they're not your deployments, but the projects that are done, do they tend to be small quantities and a lot of different customers or do you have accounts where they may have hundreds or even thousands of your units because they're all over the place?  Lisa Schneider: Yeah I would say probably 70% of our business is the small to mid-sized business and then the other 30% is where you're going to find the more enterprise larger on the upward of a thousand projects.  As a biz dev person when you have a whole cavalcade of smaller customers that gets to be a challenge to manage, right? Lisa Schneider: It can be, but this is what makes life a lot easier for us as a team here is that our products are so easy to use that they are plug-and-play. They can figure it out. We have a whole learning program, a bunch of videos on our website, examples, and things. We have a chat, so it flows nicely. It really does.  It hasn't been too much of a burden because I think we just make things that are simple. That's what we pride ourselves on.  So I go directly to you, I'm a museum, and I need three of these things for looping videos. I order them, and you ship them to me, what do I need to do to get them running?  Lisa Schneider: You need to simply connect it to your HDMI to any of the screens that you're using, and then you upload the content on the USB SD and then you insert it and it will play or if you're using the network capabilities, same thing, you plug it in, you get your network connection and then depending on if you're using the free embedded software, It's a matter of just opening up the software on the player and choosing the source that you want to use. If it's, let's say USB SD, if you want to use SFTP or LAN, you can point your content to a URL, but it's basic clicking of a button and uploading your file, it's just that simple. So if you want to get fancy, you can, and use file transfers and everything else, but, if IT is not your role, but you just need to get something running, you don't need to bring somebody in to help you.  Lisa Schneider: That is exactly right. In fact, I always tell people, I say, you do not need a computer science or an IT degree to run our stuff. So you get it, take it out of the box, plug and play, and you're really ready to go.  If it's networked, wre you getting questions about security these days?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, I think we have. Not too many, but Travis would be better suited to answer that. He handles that side of that.  Travis McMahand: Yeah, for security, we really try to lock down the player to make it so that it really doesn't have any incoming ports to it. So you can't log directly into the player over a network. The only settings that you can do on the player itself are done with either the infrared remote control that comes with the player, or you can connect a keyboard and mouse to our network players to access the menu that way. But for the sources, say you're using a shared LAN folder or an SFTP site, you're putting your content on one of those sources, and then you're just pointing the player to that source and telling it, okay, go check for new content or check for changed content every hour or every day or whatever. So the player itself goes out and checks for the content. There's no inbound traffic to the player that the player doesn't initiate,  Gotcha, and I gather from the IT and IS crowd lately that whereas several years ago they were pretty jumpy about using Android, they're now pretty comfy with it.  Travis McMahand: Yeah, I haven't heard too many complaints about it being an Android player. Once we explained the security that we have built into the player, we really haven't had any pushback on that.  Let's talk about interactive. Why did you go down that path? Was it customer demand?  Lisa Schneider: Yes. You know what? It actually was. It started with a museum actually in San Diego and they came to us and they said, this is what we're looking for. We want to trigger content and this is how we want to do it, and we thought, okay, we'll give it a shot, and then it just bloomed from there.  Once we came up with a way of connecting and how we're gonna create the interaction, then we started evolving from there with all the different types of interactive sources. You also have interactive devices that are paired with your playout boxes. Was that a kind of a learned decision that you're best to develop your own as opposed to trying to integrate other stuff that may be used for other purposes and could maybe be hacked to work with this? Lisa Schneider: Yeah, I think that the reason we just did it in the house was because we wanted to control it, and also really because everything was just out was so complex. We're like, okay, we need to just bring this down 10 notches. Let's just, we need to make the super simple for our customers. So then that's why we just developed it in-house.  Yeah, in my dark past, I worked with a company that did digital signage solutions and had its own media players, and I remember there was an ask for interactive, and we had to source big ass buttons from a company that made buttons for slot machines, and then we had a guy who worked out of a, I think a motorhome somewhere in California and designed controller boards. So we had a custom controller board for this thing and everything else and it worked, but good God, that was a process as opposed to just saying, “Yeah, I want this play-out box and, I need two of these, and two of those interactive things.”  Lisa Schneider: Oh, that's pretty much how it went down with us too. And our team really loves the challenge. We love doing custom work. I know Travis is working on a bunch of stuff right now with different projects. We have one that is using our interactive IP push, is what we call it, for the automotive parts department actually, and I can't say who just yet, but, it's a customer that just reported back that with our solution that we created, this was the first time in the history of their company they had the highest productivity.  Again, it comes from the customers. That's what I mean. When I say we listen to our customers, they help you grow,  When I look at the different accessories that you have, there's motion sensors, there's triggers and buttons and things like that. What typically are your customers using?  Lisa Schneider: I would say the most popular would be the LED push buttons and/or the IR touchless buttons for museums, also in the trade show booths, I would say our sense solution, is our motion sensor that kind of detects human distance from a display. So you can lure somebody into something and then it would trigger the content once they're in within a certain range. I would say that was probably our two most popular solutions.  We also have a sensor that's a wave to-play where you just wave your hand over an area and it will trigger content. That's another popular one too. I've always wondered about some of those things because if there's any sort of a learning curve, like you, you've got to get somebody to wave to change a file or whatever that is, how hard is it for them to figure that out? Even though it sounds simple.  Lisa Schneider: Yeah, we do. We make suggestions for, God, the stuff that some of these integrators come up with is so cool, but they do make it really simple, using decal stickers or there it's on plywood or it says, wave your hand here, or it's within the content itself. So they come up to the screen. It's pretty pretty self-explanatory.  We're not one of those where it's going to tell you your age, your hair color and eye color and anything to that degree. This is more simple. We don't find too many people standing there lost looking at it, thank goodness.  Are many using the capabilities to lift and learn?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, that's one of our newer solutions that we just came out with, really cool, lifting a product off of a display and then it triggering. Retailers are really taking to that right now as well as the museums, where you have to physically hold something, lift it.  Yeah. It's interesting because that's something that's an idea, a concept, and a capability that has been around for 10-15 years. So when I've seen companies saying, look, we can do lift and learn. I'm thinking, okay, you didn't exactly discover fire. It's been around, but it really didn't have much marketplace adoption until now, it seems, recently.  Lisa Schneider: It is, but the lift and learns that was out there before were again, so complex and we take it down a notch and it's just a matter of making a harness, they plug it in the back of the player, plug it in the TV and you name your files a certain way and they're good to go. So yeah, we're not reinventing anything, but. We have made it so simple to use that you don't need that, to a degree to figure it out.  When you talk to prospects and they ask about your company and everything, is there a reference customer, or a project that you tend to trot out and say, here's a great example of what we do? Lisa Schneider: Yes, there are so many. We're lucky enough to have a whole plethora on our website of case studies that have participated in that. So if I say yes, if it's a museum, I say, okay, I have a link to a laundry list of museums, and here's what we did for them. They shared their photos and how they did it. So yes, we absolutely can do that.  All right, this has been great. It's terrific to finally have a chat with you guys and find out more about your company. Thanks for spending some time with me  Lisa Schneider: Yes, absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity. It's always so good to chat with you.  Travis McMahand: Yeah. Thank you

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT One of the particularly interesting things about Outform is how a company that's been doing digital in retail for 20-plus years is not all that well known in digital signage circles. Not that it's hurt the Miami-based company, which has offices and manufacturing facilities all over the world, and has delivered countless tech-centered shopper engagement solutions for some of the world's biggest brands. I'd been operating mostly with the impression that Outform designed nice-looking digital fixtures for retail, but there is a lot more to the company than that. They do the whole nine yards of retail from idea through execution. I had a great chat that could have gone on for a few hours with Outform founder Ariel Haroush. We started with the company's roots and how Haroush kind of fell into scalable digital solutions for retail. We get into how the company works and the state of things like retail media. Then we spend quite a bit of time talking about Haroush's ambitious new venture, called Future Stores. It takes the notion of pop-up stores, and gives it the scale and digital experience demanded by big global brands. The first location opens in central London on October 30th. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Ariel, thanks for joining me. For those who don't know, can you give a rundown of what Outform does and their background?  Ariel Haroush: Outform is a retail marketing company in essence. We've been referred to as an innovation agency because we are very much on the cutting edge of retail, experiential, and innovation in retail. The company does everything from design all the way to execution, which is quite unique because we have the ability to ideate and strategize like a typical agency that you would expect. But we are transitioning seamlessly into the execution room. So everything we ideate, we engineer, we prototype and we manufacture. So while the business has a very, I would say appeal of an agency, we are, in essence, a manufacturer at scale, and we have manufacturing facilities all over the world in three main regions in Europe, in Asia, and in the States alone, we have two manufacturing facilities, both in Chicago and in San Francisco. Did you start as a manufacturer and evolve into an agency or vice versa, or none of the above?  Ariel Haroush: My journey as the founder of Outform was quite unique. My passion for the industry actually started when I watched the movie Back to the Future. I'm sure you remember Marty flying all the way to the future with the DeLorean and then you see this billboard transform into a shark, and I was just mesmerized by it, and there's something in it that made me say, “oh my God, this is what I want to do.”  So when I started my career, I was always very much leaning to the visual aspect of things. I had an office in Times Square and I was looking at all the signage there and I went, geez, why no one is doing it on a commercial level, and that was the seed of founding Outform. So I started really with no manufacturing background, but with a lot of passion towards how spectacular signage should be, and I was able to convince one customer to give me an opportunity. Back in the days it was Siemens and I had done this huge mobile phone replicas in, one of the biggest trade shows called CeBIT and that was an experience, and one thing led to another, the second customer was Samsung, and I was moving from one customer to another, creating those experiences.  As things evolved, one of the biggest opportunities that I've got was a customer, in the United States, in Chicago that said, “Hey, are you doing all this massive, spectacular signage. Would you mind doing something smaller in scale?” I said what do you mean by that? He said, we don't need giant signage. We need something that we can fit into a retail store, and I said, okay, what do you have in mind? He said, I need 20 mobile phone replicas in a size of, not bigger than a meter or three feet. And I said, gee, that sounds like a lot of units, and back in the days I used to do those things in the Philippines, and he called me about two weeks later and he said oh, by the way, it's not 10 units, it's 500, and I was like, what? So the factory owner in the Philippines said, “Hey Ariel, we cannot do 500.” I said, so what do I need to do? He said, you need to fly to China and look for someone to do injection tools for molds.  So I took my backpack and I went into China and the guy called me again and said, it's not 500. It's actually 2000, and I'm like, what's going on? I discovered retail in essence and the scale that you have within retail. That time was actually the launch of the Razor phone. I don't know if you remember that Motorola phone. It was a massive success. I've done, in a period of about, I think it was 12 months, I did 70,000 units that went to every single store globally, because there was just a smart way of how we design it, in a way like it's cutting the ceiling or the wall or the floor. So you just apply it, and it seems like the phone is so sharp that it's cutting whatever surface you place it on. So everyone wanted to have it, and then, I realized retail is where the scale is, and the manufacturing aspect of it is what gives the business model way more substance. So with that in mind, I started to invest in factories, and one thing led to another, and I started to get into a place that, we're now buying factories, and we started to scale the business from there, and here I am today with more than a thousand people at Outform in various regions, doing what I enjoy the most, which is shaping the future of retail. Wow. Maybe there's not a when moment, but, I'm curious how you evolved into doing the agency ideation through the execution side of it as you did these things, you realized, the best people to actually manage this and deploy it and so on are my own people as opposed to trying to sub this out? Ariel Haroush: Part of the journey of working with customers, I worked with a very big tech company in Cupertino and you can guess who, and they were so secretive about everything, and we could not outsource anything in terms of the thinking side of things, and I just needed to bring people in house and I always had a tendency to creative, and I was very involved in that side and one person and then another person, and then you find yourself with a creative team and you start to conceptualize and bring in ideas, and because a lot of the stuff that we do had a highly fused tech integration, we started to create our own kind of R&D team to deal with those things. Many times I face situations where clients come to me and say, " Oh, my agency created this and they could not deliver on that, and we are super disappointed how we can ensure that it's not going to happen with you guys”, and that's always been a differentiator because everything we design we actually do. So we just start building up on those experiences, and one of the things as I built the company that I never really liked when customers or people refer to us as the vendor because the vendor is something very, in essence, commoditized type of a description, right? But I really enjoyed it when I was a partner or an agency, and I invested heavily in that because I felt this is where we create value, and every time I had a conversation with clients, which was on the C-level. It was more about how we can win in retail. It wasn't about how we're going to make it exactly, and what's the engineering and how many screws and the thickness of the material and all that good stuff, it was more about how we can influence the shopper? That's always been the passion. So investing heavily into that, and that was a differentiator for Outfrom, because, in essence, if you think about the industry in a nutshell, and you ask yourself why advertising agencies became so big as they grew, like the Ogilvy, the Y&R, the Saatchi & Saatchi, they had a really unique business model. They competed heavily on the pitch, right? And they put everything in front of it. Design, planners, strategy, and once they win the pitch, in essence, the reward was the media buying. So if you compete on a Coke pitch, you know that they're going to spend 300 million on advertising, which you buy media on and you're getting a commission on that. So that was the scalable business model.  For Outform, it's been the manufacturing side of it. That's the scalable part, but you have to put all the upfront investments to have a seat at the table, and to me, that was a model to replicate. When I look at our industry, it was very fragmented to mostly moms and pops type of operation, and they always looked at it in terms of, “I'm a manufacturer. Tell me what you need to do, and I'll make it for you.”  But that's not really the conversation customers want to have. They want to know how they can best win in retail, and they come into those experts to help them craft the proposition, and when you think about our industry, as it's getting more and more technology fused, you have to rely on people that understand the different disciplines in terms of manufacturing. So it's not just cutting wood or bending metal or using plastic. It's a combination of all of the above, including tech, including data, including how you can learn and optimize your offering as you move forward. So there's just so much built into that, and Outform was very eager to play in that area. Yeah, I've certainly through the years seen no end of companies who manufacture things. They've invented something and they're very proud of their features and specs surrounding that thing, but they go in selling that thing as opposed to, as you were describing, talking about the objective and selling a solution and providing a solution and you can see how the industry has evolved that way and how more and more, particularly large clients who are saying, I don't want to cherry pick all the components that I need for this thing. I want a partner who's going to help me hold my hand through this whole thing and execute it and, be cohesive as opposed to, ending up with a lot of finger pointing when there's a problem.  Ariel Haroush: Exactly, and if you think about it, every customer has different types of challenges. When you look at the likes of Google, and they need to educate the customers about what Google Home is all about. That's one type of challenge, and when you look at Estee Lauder trying to maximize the shelf efficiencies, that's a different type of challenge. You also many times find yourself depending on where you actually have been deployed, the mindset of the shopper from a Home Depot to a Best Buy is completely different. When you're in Home Depot, you want to know how easy it is and how much time it'll take to install. When you're in Best Buy, you want to know the technical specs and the mindset really shifts between the retailers that you're in. So the emphasis on how you maximize the conversion is different. There's just so many opportunities. Of engaging and I'm not even going and discussing the Gen Z behavior and shift in behavior that's really challenging a lot of retailers and a lot of brands, because if you think about it, the type of consumers that we have, the call it the shoppers of tomorrow, they're so different in mindset. I always like to give the examples that I have five kids by the way, my oldest one is 16 and we're driving in Miami and he said, “Hey, dad, can you change the song?” And I'm looking at him and say, it's the radio. You can change it, and he's giving me this weird look. He said, what do you mean by changing the song? I said, you can't do this on radio. He said I don't get it. So what if you don't like the song? I said, you wait, and he said, if you don't like the next one, I said, you wait. I said, dad, it makes no sense, and he's right because he's using Spotify. It makes no sense.  You got to get him a rotary dial telephone. Ariel Haroush: Amen. Amen. So we are talking about a different type of shoppers and those shoppers, if you look at the attention span generally of Gen Z compared to millennials, compared to baby boomers. I just see my kids, I would say that their attention span is on the length of a TikTok story. They're instantly getting bored, and man, it's a science. How do you get them not to flip this TikTok story or the Instagram story? And you're trying to make sense of it and to understand what actually captured their attention, and if you're in a retail environment, that's not different than your TikTok story moments, right? You have so many offerings, and you need to make sure that the shopper is actually giving attention so you can tell your story so you can potentially convert. This is what we're dealing with, and we have to be super efficient in the way we are crafting the proposition to our clients. So who are your typical customers or Outform's typical customers? I'm guessing it's much more brands than retailers themselves.  Ariel Haroush: It's a combination of both actually. We're working with many brands. We've been super active for the past 20 years dealing with the brands because in essence, they need to deploy whatever they do and not only one retailer, but multiple retailers, and we need to do it on a global basis. So the challenge around it, it's quite enormous, and we've been excelling in that landscape, but we also have a lot of retailers coming to us.  We realize that we as well need to change, and if we're not going to change, we're going to end up like the Sears and the other retailers that went under, so what do we need to do? And you can start seeing a shift in the way retailers are operating. They used to be super passive, by the way. They'd say, “We shouldn't worry. The brand will figure that out.” But the brand also realized that they can get sales online. So the retailers now need to start asking, “Am I just a showroom type of a facility? No, I need to add more value.”  So how do you do that and what's the proposition for the shoppers? So everyone is challenged around what's the future of retail.  Yeah, that's interesting because I've heard endlessly for years and had some experience myself that retailers are interested in the digital stuff and experiential and everything else, but they want the brands to put it in and they want the brands to pay for it. As Chris Riegel for Stratacash says, “They're like T Rex's, very large, but very short arms.”  Ariel Haroush: You're right, but there is a shift here because if you look at Best Buy as an example, they're realizing that a big component of the revenue is coming right now from what you refer to as retail media, which is an online terminology. If you want to get good placement on the Best Buy website, you're paying for it, and there is a big revenue contribution to their bottom line coming from that. So everyone understands that retail media is on a meteoric rise.  Now, the retailers are looking at it, so if I can generate this amount of income from my website, wait a minute, I have all this fleet of stores that can generate revenue for me and that's an opportunity that I don't necessarily want to give away to the brands. So we started to see a tremendous amount of conversations happening around how we can utilize our stores as a component of the retail media. So you're going to see a shift in terms of how retail is starting to look into it and say, there is an opportunity and untapped opportunity that we want to materialize on. Are a lot of retailers over excited about retail media because they see the big numbers, but that they maybe don't understand that 99% of that dollar figure is going to mobile and online and not a hell of a lot of it goes into in store display.  Ariel Haroush: The online numbers are staggering, right? I think by 2027, it's going to be as big as social media. So it's just huge. Now people ask: will the retail media in real life will be the next big thing? Now it's really a matter of eyeballs and a matter of conversion. Because all you're really getting when you are putting it online, you're getting X amount of eyeballs that are able to be converted and the percentage of conversion is actually a lead to sales and that's why it's such a hype right now.  But if you get X amount of millions of people passing through your store and brands are competing in your stores on conversion, they are willing to be the one spending money on getting those eyeballs. You basically just got yourself a new revenue stream. Now one should ask whether the traditional retailer just being transactional is the future, because in essence, we are living in a place. It used to be called Omnichannel, right? Omnichannel, for the listeners here, I'll use the analogyof a highway. Think about the highway with different lanes and every lane represents the different side of the Omnichannel. But we all drive today and we are crossing lanes all the time. So in essence, Omnichannel is no longer the right way of phrasing it, I call it more of a unified commerce because you can walk in the store, but you are with your phone, so you are constantly connected and you can compare prices on your phone in the store, and you can make a decision to click the button on your phone And it's gonna wait for you on your doorstep.  So what is an Omnichannel anymore? It's more unified commerce and in a world of unified commerce It doesn't matter where the purchase actually happens. So yes, you have your stores because you need to have a presence. It's almost like a business card of your brand. But in essence, the metrics of how much I'm selling in the store should not be the most applicable way of doing your KPIs if you get a halo effect that happening outside of the store, it doesn't matter. It's a unified conference.  So where are you at with the company now with Outform? Because you started this new entity that I want to talk about called Future Stores.  When we chatted, oh God, back in the spring or something like that, you had mentioned that this thing was coming and that you were continuing to be the CEO of Outform, but maybe perhaps winding that down. Ariel Haroush: No, Outform is my true love. It's a company I founded. I enjoy every moment of it because every day is a new day. But when I see what's the future of retail and when I'm asking myself, and this is something I've always been extremely passionate about, one of the things that I've seen time and time again, that many times we work with the brands and we're doing something, it doesn't really get the big bang that we all hope for, and I ask myself why. If you want to do, for example, a pop up, and let's say you want to do a pop up because you want to tell the story, and you have a product to launch. By the time you're designing the pop up, you need to design it, you need to engineer it, you need to prototype it, you need to spend three to four months and then you need to find a location that you can actually host, but the landlords are not waiting for you. So securing a location six months in advance is super difficult. So many times we do all this effort and we end up compromising and we find ourselves in a shopping mall, and there's so much work, sweat and tears built into that, that when you're actually launching it, you don't get the big bang that you expect. And to me, that was always a missed opportunity, and every investment was one off, and if you do something which is very analog driven and things change, context change, the market change, competitive landscape change, you're not unable to react. So to me, I felt there must be a better solution, and when I look at the high street, it doesn't matter where you go, whether you're in 5th Avenue, Oxford streets, Champs-Élysées, Ginza in Tokyo, in essence, you're seeing the same old brands time and time again, and you've seen Zara in one location, you've seen them probably in every location, so nothing really drives you to step inside, which is a real shame. I ask, given everything we spoke about that TikTok story mentality, I said, what if the high street can be as dynamic as our social feed and I had this vision of creating a space that can be almost like the sphere in Vegas for retail, that is fully immersive and brands can come in without the worrying of engineering and prototyping and manufacturing and finding the spot, they actually know the size and they get the best location ever because it's one of those high street flagship locations and everything is digitized and everything is immersive and they get the big bang for their investment. I said, wow, that's actually something if you're going back to the Marty moment, flying to the future, that's the moment for me where the billboard becomes a shark, where you notice something and you can not miss it. That's really the thesis behind Future Stores. Those futures stores are set on prime locations. We're talking about the best of the best. Oxford Street, 5th Avenue, where brands can do global activations in multi-cities at the same time without all the hustle and bustle of creating specific, tailor-made, manufacturing, analog driven for a specific site and when content can change from the weekend to the workdays, from the morning to the evening, when it's fully immersive, and we are launching it on October 30th. so this is about 30 days from today. Our first client will be a massive CE brand, and oh my God, people will see it in the media for sure, I'm telling you it's mind boggling. Just the storytelling, the possibilities. someone that's seen it said I feel like it's the iPhone for retail because there's just so many options,  So if I'm a massive CE brand, and I book future stores, what am I getting and what are the parameters? Do I have to book for a month? Can I book it for a day? Is it staffed for me or do I have to bring in staff? How does all that work?  Ariel Haroush: You can book it in slots of a week to two weeks to four weeks. We don't want the brand to come in and take it for six months because that's going against kind of the thesis of a high street is constantly being dynamic and we don't think the shoppers would care if it's not changing all the time.  You get everything basically. It's a full retail operation that you don't have to invest in the time in, because all the walls and the ceiling and everything, all the tech components are already built up. All you need to do is explain your content and we can help you with that as well, and you have the back of the house. So what do you basically need is basically your decision. If you need security at the door because people are going to queue outside, we can provide your security guard at the fee. But the rest is everything is okay. It's ready for usage.  So the huge project plan with the endless Gantt charts and everything else you would have to do, if you were leasing the space on your own and staffing it and designing it in the whole nine yards, that's covered off.  A CE brand can just say, I want this for two weeks. Is it available in this time window? There's obviously  some planning they still have to do, but 90% of it is gone.  Ariel Haroush: Exactly. You're really getting a turnkey solution and the beauty about it is that you can say, “Hey, I know I'm going to launch a product in late March and I need to be in an extra X amount of cities. Can I book it now?” Knowing that it's going to wait for you and knowing that you have the possibility to use your own content for it is just, I think it's the future. Now, this is my thesis, of course, but time will tell.  I wrote about this the other day and I said it's about two blocks away from Outernet London and very reminiscent of that, but there's some very big differences as well that's mostly about public art and so on, but it's the same kind of experience, right?  Where you walk in, you've got LED on the walls, you've got LED on the ceiling, and everywhere else.  Ariel Haroush: Yeah, and Outernet, good friends of mine, they did phenomenally well. Frankly speaking, it's becoming the number one destination in London and well deserved by the way, because it's people just coming in and getting inspired and I love that. I love the people getting inspired just by walking in the street, and they do amazing content, but yes, it's a different proposition because they are more of a public arts media component. We are all about future retail, while they provide a sense of awareness, we are providing the awareness piece, but also the consideration and the conversion. So there is an ROI component to it that is very clearly measured. We spoke about retail media, in essence, it is retail media in the real world because we're enabling you as a brand to get all the eyeballs, but you convert the eyeballs to people getting into the store experiencing the product with also the option to buy  What is technically in there? Is it fine pitch LED on the walls and ceiling?  Ariel Haroush: That's correct I mean we have the highest resolution of LEDs anywhere installed in London. So if you compare it to Outernet, the density of our pixel rate is much, much more advanced. That's a given because we started way later than they did, so they had to commit to a technology that is probably three years old. We have amazing brightness. You're not going to be able to see the pixels, it's just as much of a high resolution, millions of pixels around the stores, which is super impressive to see.  I think on October 30th, when we launch, people will really grasp the magnitude of it.  Who is behind this? Ariel Haroush: Myself and two other partners that I have, but I'm the driving force behind the concept.  So you have an extremely vested interest in making this work.  Ariel Haroush: Yeah, absolutely, and it's weird to say it because I am a businessman and obviously the financial world is a metric, but my reasoning for doing that was not for financial gain. I'm really passionate about where I can take this industry forward, and there's just so many possibilities. I'm 50 years old this year, so I took three weeks in India and I was trying to look for my Zen and one of the random meetings that I had in India, I met this very nice lady from the Richmond group and she was doing a one year tour. She wanted to retire and she said, you know what, I'm just going to go on my own, we had dinner and she asked me, “Ariel, tell me about your business” and I decided to speak about Future Stores versus Outform, which is a much more mature business, and she said, “okay, I get it, it sounds exciting, but what's your gain? Do you really want to just make money?” And it really poked me in an interesting way, and I said, why do you ask that in the sense that the way you asked it. She said, no, I'm just trying to understand. I said there is a motive that I'm trying to do that I'm not describing to many people, but, given how you frame it, I want to describe it to you and she said,well,  go ahead. I said, one of the things that I'm really passionate about is, I'm not going to use a big statement, but democratizing the high streets, if you think about it, it's something that I'm really passionate about and you ask why. Because frankly speaking, if you think about the high street is kept to the typical candidates that you can already list down without me even need to say it. It's those big brands that you see everywhere and they occupy all the time the high street and it's not like we're not going to engage with them, on the contrary we will, but I want to be in a position that I hold at least 25% of the time of future stores into new brands, innovative brands, brands that are not necessarily going to get the time of the day to be on the high street, but they are the up and coming brands. So we are talking right now with a couple of brands that I'm super excited about that people are going to learn about.  There are celebrity launches. There are other people that really have amazing stories to tell in the high street, and they just don't get the visibility to be on the high street. So that's another motivation that I have outside of just the financial aspiration that this concept has, and this concept, should it be successful? It will scale to a variety of different locations across the globe. London, obviously it's an advanced build or probably ready to go, but other cities you mentioned like Champs-Élysées, Tokyo, are these ones in the pipeline or are these ideas of what could happen?  Ariel Haroush: Tokyo is what could happen. But obviously, if you think about where would be the most relevant cities to start with, it's not a secret that New York, London and Paris are going to be the top three at least from my lens. Asia is a bit far away at this stage. We still need to prove the business model. But yes, we have active engagement in the other cities that I mentioned, and we are just vetting the final sites as we speak.  This is the sort of thing that is very clever and everything else without question, but it's also something that a commercial property developer could look at and go, “Yeah, I'm going to build that too and I'll give it a different name and I'll tweak it just enough to make it mine.”  How do you deal with that?  Ariel Haroush: I'll say good luck with that. The level of complexity in storytelling and working in collaboration, I would never even dream to do that if it wasn't for my experience in Outform.  I have so much experience in Outform, doing it for 20 years. I understand what it takes and how to tell stories in retail. Landlords want to be landlords, and many of them are already approaching. I said, why don't we partner? And that makes sense in order to scale it faster. But yeah, you need a certain level of expertise to know what you're doing. This is not just a typical media play. It's much more than that.  This is not just slapping up, some fine pitch LED and renting a high profile space.  Ariel Haroush: No, there is so much more built into that, because you need to think about it in a retail operation mindset, you need to think about it in a media mindset, you need to think about it from a storytelling perspective, and you really need to maximize what we call the funnel. Because if you think about the marketing funnel, it's built in such a way that you spend money on awareness and that's usually going out of home media or TV or whatever, then you spend money on consideration, which is experiential, pop ups, you name it, and then you have the conversion piece, which mostly kept to retail stores. And last but not least, the royalty component. That's the marketing funnel. We are, in essence, trying to flatten the funnel so you get your awareness, consideration and conversion all in one location, but there is also a huge component that I don't think people understand the value of it, but they will, which is the amplification. If you look at Outernet as an example, for every campaign that they're running, they have tens of millions of views of people who have never even been to Outernet, and if you look at every single thing that the Sphere did in Vegas, they have hundreds of millions of shares of something. People have never even been to Vegas, but they know about the Sphere. This has an additional impact Future Stores will be able to deliver.  If you ask me, Ariel, people tried before. Why would that be any difference? Scale and also inmindset, because when I moved to the States, someone said to me, go big or go home. And I asked, what do you mean by that? And he said, if you're not putting everything in, then it's just not good. That's what we're trying to do. You cannot compromise the location. You cannot say, let me bring this huge brand for a store that looks like a mobile store. They just are not going to do it. So if you want to get people to take you seriously, you have to go all in and that's what we've done here. So we're talking about a huge investment that we're putting into the high street. Probably if you think about London outside of the Outernet, it's probably the biggest investment ever done in a retail store, and that's what we're going after, we're going after something that is quite impactful and if it's going to deliver the amount of eyeballs that we think it would, then people will notice it, and if people will notice it, then brands will start to see the value in it.  I'm looking forward to seeing it at some point. I'm kicking myself now. I traveled through London to get to ISE in Barcelona, but I just did an overnight booking. Ariel Haroush: Oh my God. I'll be very happy to host you there. I'm going there every now and then. It's still in a kind of a installation mode, but all the screens are up, we're now doing the testing. It's a site. The ceilings are super high, so you get the full immersion and without telling who is the first client, all I can say is that, once you see the first execution, it's mind boggling. It's really above and beyond what I ever imagined it to be. So I'm super pumped and excited about where this is going to go.  October 30th, right?  Ariel Haroush: Yep.  All right. Thank you, Ariel. I think you're onto something.  Ariel Haroush: I hope so. Thank you for taking the time.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The Outdoor Advertising Association of America represents and guides the interests and activities of some 850 member organizations across the US, including the biggest media companies, brands that do a lot of outdoor, agencies, ad-tech providers, and suppliers. That's billboard, of course, but also the other formats for advertising, from transit shelters to place-based media networks on TVs in venues like bars, clinics and workout studios The OAAA has been around since 1891, and these days is seeing rapid growth for the medium, especially on the digital side. If they're not already doing digital, most OAAA members are going down that path and also adopting technologies like AI. I had a really good chat, about a bunch of things, with Anna Bager - the association's President and CEO. We get into the state of the medium, which is particularly busy because of ALL the money flowing into political advertising. We also touch on issues like a need to simplify the planning, buying and distribution ecosystem, and the OAAA's perspective and activity around something that's huge in other regions like Europe - sustainability. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Anna, thank you for joining me. This is going to be a simple question to start out with, but can you tell me what the OAAA does and why it exists?  Anna Bager: Absolutely, so we are the Out of Home Advertising Association of America and we are what I would call a classic trade association. We focus on two things. We want to protect the industry and we want to grow the industry. So on the protection front, we have a pretty big government affairs unit. We do state and federal lobbying on things that really matter to the industry, such as the First Amendment, anything real estate, infrastructure, and the Highway Beautification Act, which controls the number of signs or at least roadside that you can have in the US and privacy is another area that we're increasingly interested in privacy and data regulation. Keeping an eye on what's happening, making sure that there are no laws that don't work well for the industry that is being passed or hopefully not, and, also looking for opportunities, where we can, as an industry where we can maybe benefit from some of the legislation and more things that are happening in DC or state level that can work well for the industry.  So that's one part lobbying and government affairs and a lot of legal operations, and then the other part is the growth side, and for that, we do research on behalf of the industry. We do a lot of promotion of the industry at our own events or other events. We're out there talking to advertisers and brands about why they should be. Spending more money, and investing more out-of-home, and then we create guidelines, standards, and frameworks that help the industry operate better and make it easier to buy and sell. I think that sums it up.  It's a member organization?  Anna Bager: It's a member organization. We are the largest out-of-home association, I think, in the world, actually. We have probably close to 800 members and pretty much everyone who is in the out-of-home industry in the US and some other international members.  So this would be Lamar all the way down to an almost hyper-local kind of media owner? Anna Bager: It would definitely be but it could also be a gas station TV. It could be a cinema. It could be Airports and transit, so we cover it all. It's not just the roadside, it's all the different formats.  Is there a cutoff? I'm curious about some of what they call faster consumer TV networks like Atmosphere and Loop and so on that are in bars and it's a streaming app. Anna Bager: They are members too. Okay, so where would you cut it off?  Anna Bager: I don't cut it off. I think we welcome anyone as a member if they're in out-of-home advertising, which is, we're called out-of-home, but if I had been the one to take a pick, I probably would have called it location-based media because that's really what we are, right? Wherever there is signage or any type of ad that's there because of the location, and the context that is there it seems to be a good place to reach consumers or business people because they're there at that time and they might be receptive to a message. So anyone who's in that could be retail media networks. It could be retail organizations, could be place-based. It could be a point of care, like doctor's offices, but we typically don't have those companies as members, but they could be. Also, one thing that I think is common for most of our members is that we're one too many advertisers. We're not targeting individuals so it can be seen by many. So anyone who's doing that could be a member of the OAAA.  You mentioned retail media networks. I was going to ask about that later, let's get into it. You mentioned it. I'm curious because of the rise of that and how you're starting to see more and more activity around the in-store piece of it and not just the online and mobile parts. Are they different budgets?  Anna Bager: I think so. I think it depends. It's certainly a growth opportunity for the industry. Retail in general is taking place in a store, a lot of it online, but you have to get people there or you have to get them interested. You also may want to amplify a message before they're in the store, you want to serve them an offer and that's where we can come in.  The retail media networks themselves, buy a lot of media also on behalf of their advertisers. So it could be a Coca-Cola, right? They buy media for them. I think that out-of-home is a natural part of media that you should buy to create the most bang for the buck for a company, it's not just in the stores, it's everything around and creates an audience extension, et cetera. So there might be other budgets. It's definitely a different type of buyer, but I think we're uniquely positioned and I think we play an important role in the world of retail media, reaching consumers on the go or even at home.  I think what these networks have can be very useful, especially now that out-of-home has become more digital and you can increasingly use data and target in a very different way and also change out messages really fast. These guys have first-party data, from loyalty programs or consumers basically leaning in and allowing them to use their data and the ability to then use that data on the knowledge of where consumers might be or on the go, or, the interest they might have and use contextual and location-based advertising makes it just so much better. I think it's a great match. The ability to use the data to do that.  So what's the state of being out-of-home at this point? In your keynote, which I think was for your annual conference, you talked about double-digit growth.  Anna Bager: Yeah, I mean out-of-home has had an interesting journey since the pandemic. Before that, we were growing very steadily every year, then obviously we had a dip in the pandemic and then we had an amazing year in 2022, where I think out-of-home were faster than any other ad media. And since then, it's been steadily going up. This year is particularly interesting. There's a lot going on. We have an election that's coming up that's driving a lot of ad dollars and also not just ad dollars into out-of-home, but also into other media where other brands then look for a positioning somewhere else. So there's just a lot of movement in the market right now. It's an economy that hopefully will start growing again. So it's been a good year. We keep growing and I think next year is going to be hopefully even better than this year.  And does digital now represent the overall kind of installed base and also a percentage of overall revenue? Anna Bager: Digital is interesting. So I think it's probably around 30 percent of all the installed base, but it's close to half of the revenue and most of the growth is coming from digital, so definitely an area that the industry is investing in and I want to keep moving forward.  Is it harder and harder to sell static? Anna Bager: No, I don't think so. I think it's just really easy to sell digital. I think you can still sell static. Static has a lot of benefits too. You have a message up for a very long time, right? It's very sturdy and you know that it works and then again, you put a billboard up, for example, it's going to be there for 30 or more days. So It's the same message that just is engraved in the sense of a little bit of a mini landmark, right? So static works really well too and for certain types of advertisers. It's absolutely key. But obviously digital has the ability to switch out content fast, use data, and do some interesting creative executions too because it's a huge growth area for us. We talked about retail media before the ability, you can do that with static too, and you can get static up fast today, but the ability to include out-of-home in more of an omnichannel media mix, it's far greater over digital because it's just there. You can just kind of plug it in. Is efficiency the big attraction? The fact that you can book something very rapidly.  Anna Bager: For digital? It all depends on the goals of the advertiser. Obviously, to be able to get a message up really fast is important. Also, to be able to switch out a message really fast, if you need to, is important. The ability to again, be able to use data. If it's raining or if it's sunshine or if there's a specific event going on that day or in that place or in that moment, you can use that knowledge to put up better ads, but it's also sometimes, the creative opportunities you have with digital can allow you to do really cool things. Anything spectacular and amorphic, brands love that, right? That's mostly digital. So there are just so many different things you can do. It all depends on what the advertiser wants to achieve.  You mentioned anamorphic, the idea of 3D visual illusions, is that kind of the bright shiny object, and there's a bright shiny object every 2-3 years that comes along and the old object gets abandoned? Anna Bager: I don't think so. Out-of-home is so many different things. Some call it iconic, some call it spectacular. Within that category, definitely it's the anamorphic or things like the Sphere. I think that's just a different part of being out-of-home, which I think will always be very interesting to brands who want to make a big mark. Clearly, you can get a lot of earned media through great executions because It's very socially shareable and you can give it global legs, it's done really well. So I think that's one type of out-of-home. I don't think it's a shiny object, even though it is a shiny object. I think it's just something that brands are very interested in right now, but that doesn't take away from the fact that there are other types of digital boards or signage, and not just roadside stuff, that works really well for brands in certain ways. I think the power of our industry is that we can reach pretty much everyone at any point in time, anywhere, right? And it doesn't really matter if that's static digital or anamorphic. It's just the reach that we have that then, through social media and other channels creates a sort of an interactive space too. That's not just a physical space. The power of the medium is the reach and it doesn't really matter what type of signage it is, I think.  It's interesting with the anamorphic stuff, I've seen it in person, and I've seen tons of videos around it. Most of it's not very good. It's something spinning or pushing out of a screen and who cares, and it begs the larger question, when I drive around in a big city and I see a lot of digital out-of-home billboards, I think most of the creative isn't very good. There's too much on there, and I just find it weird for an established medium that so many creatives just don't get it. Anna Bager: Out-of-home is probably the most prestigious thing you can do as a creative if you want to go for those really big campaigns, but it's also really hard and that's why it's so prestigious. Less is more. Simplicity works really well. Don't overdo it. Think it through. But it's an art form. I think there's a lot of bad creative but there's also some really amazing creative. The interesting thing is you remember both. So from my perspective, and it doesn't necessarily take away from your opinion of the brand if you don't think the ad is great. You still remember and you see it and you register and you might go and buy the product. But obviously, I think, I wish everyone did better, because there's so much you can do with out-of-home because you own the whole campus, it's all yours to do something with, there's nothing but a location surrounding it, you can do really cool things, but, yeah, there's good and there's bad, but like I said, you still remember it, and I think that's the real key point, but I think with out-of-home market, just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should, and I think, I agree with you, but it's very subjective, what you like, obviously. But with that type of signage, still a lot of experimentation, I think, on let's do something really cool, and then does it really make sense or does it have a connection to the product? Maybe not, but yeah.  Yeah. I suppose it's like any advertising. There's really great national advertising and big-budget campaigns, but there's a whole bunch of more local and even hyperlocal ads and they're not produced by big agencies with top-tier creatives. I was in a rental car recently driving through Toronto on the 401, so 401 is slow, so you got lots of time to look at billboards, and I still couldn't absorb everything on some of these because there was just so much stuff trying to be jammed in there.  Anna Bager: Yeah. You have to think about that. You have to think that the audience is going to have very little time to look at it, right? Unless there's a traffic jam. Therefore you have to make it so that they can see, they can register, they can get it. They also maybe can remember that one little thing that you want them to Google, it shouldn't be too much on them. I agree. But I have to say that, and I just came back this morning from my, event that we did in Las Vegas where we had a lot of our members present, different interesting creative executions, and there were a lot of great local out-of-home. You don't have to be, like, one of the biggest creative agencies on Madison Avenue to create good content. There are a lot of locals out-of-home that play to them, it is very local, just knowing the audience.  I'll give you one really cool example. There's a law firm called Morgan & Morgan and they are pretty much everywhere, they're big out-of-home buyers, you would consider that local advertising, even though they're in many parts of the country. I think this was last year, they took some of their billboards and put graffiti all over, the Morgan & Morgan information called Morgan & Morgan and what ended up happening was that they got so many calls. Where people said, Oh my God, your billboard has been vandalized. Are you aware? And people really paid attention to it to the point where they had to take them down because people couldn't get through. Because there are so many calls. If you're very smart about it and you're speaking to an audience that is there and feels a certain connection to it because it's local, you can do really cool things and I think there's great advertising on both sides and bad.  Is the profile of media owners evolving? I asked because I used to think of media owners as just being the media companies, Mars and Patterson up in Canada and so on. But I have been hearing that property owners and commercial property owners are blocking and tackling big LED displays on the corners of their new builds or renovated builds, and then engaging a media company to sell their stuff. So they own the display as opposed to the media company leasing that space.  Anna Bager: Yeah, I don't know if that's more now than before I can speak to that. That's definitely a phenomenon, right? And you see not just in the U S that all over the world. If you own property and you're smart about it, if there's an ability to put up a sign there, of course, you should do it if it doesn't make the building uglier or cause problems in any other way, and I think we see more and more of that and then they usually use media companies to sell it for them because out-of-home is not that easy. Yeah, I've been in this for 25 years, and I still remind people that advertising isn't as easy as you think it is.  Anna Bager: No, it's supposed to look easy, but very hard. That's for sure, and there's a lot that goes into I think especially with out-of-home I am fairly new to the industry. I've been here five years. I come from the regular traditional digital media side, and it's fascinating, like the know-how location and real estate and just like how to best leverage the space that you have, that this industry has, that is not the same in other places, even though the concept is the same, it's just very different.  In the keynote you did earlier this year, one of the things you said is we need a clean, simple supply chain without too many intermediaries. What did you mean by that?  Anna Bager: Yeah, I think that's very important. Basically as the industry becomes more digital, and not just the industry, as advertising as a whole is more and more transacted in an automated or programmatic fashion and you can do static in that as well. It's important that once you start doing it that way, you lose a little bit of control of what's going on, and there are a lot of middlemen that can insert themselves along the way, and there can be a little lack of transparency as to who's actually making money or who's taking cut where. And that's something that digital media on the traditional side, as programmatic started growing and automation struggled quite a bit, and it wasn't just under the transparency and understanding of kind of how, what the supply chain looked like from a commercial point of view, it's also from a brand safety and fraud perspective, you want it to be very clean, very simple, and very straightforward what goes on in the supply chain. So the media owner knows what's happening between them and the brand actually posting the ad, and the other way around, it just makes things a lot better, and I think we have an opportunity as an industry because we're building this now to avoid a lot of the mistakes that I think did happen, when digital media came up and if you look at digital media today in programmatic, there's like 30-45% fraud or impressions that never get served. Now, our industry doesn't really have that problem. Our ads always get served pretty much, but, so maybe we don't need to have verification in the same way, but there's still, a lot of things that happen there that where there's a waste, and we don't really know where that money goes, but I think we can avoid, on our end. So that's what I meant, and I think these next couple of years are going to be critical. We're going to need a lot of people to learn a lot of know-how we're going to need to learn. There are a lot of interesting companies that can help, but there are also a lot of players that are just going to try and make a buck because they can and don't necessarily add any value to the overall transaction. When I look at the ad tech landscape, I get cross-eyed very quickly because there are so many companies selling their capabilities and they all describe what they do a little bit differently. It must be daunting to somebody taking a look at this.  Anna Bager: That's exactly it. There's a very, who you may know, smart banker, but he's also an industry figure, Terence Kawaja from Luma. He's created something called a Lumascape, which kind of illustrates, and yes, you can get lost in that pretty quickly. We want to keep it as simple as possible. There's like an ad tech company for everything. There's been a lot of money to invest in those types of companies, but in the end, you really have to provide value and improvement to the transaction, otherwise, you shouldn't be in there.  You also said in the keynote that more than 50% of media owners are now using AI. What hit me with that is why it is so low?  Anna Bager: That actually was a survey that we did, I think at the end of last year. So I'm sure it's higher now and I think it's growing exponentially. At the time I thought, huh, interesting. I think everyone uses AI these days and I think you have to, if for nothing else, because everyone uses it. So you're going to be way behind if you don't, and I think in our industry, same things as everyone else, great creative solutions, great ways of just getting content out faster, making sure that you take into consideration all the different data and things that you might need to know to do a better job. So I think AI is critical. There's a lot of bad with AI, but there's also a lot of good. I think the industry this year, since we did the survey, is probably a lot higher now. We should probably do it again. But we haven't done that yet, but it might be more, it might be closer to a 100%.  Yeah, it strikes me as it's not the highly visible stuff, the creating ads from scratch and so on. It's much more about automation and the things that can be done to increase efficiency and accuracy.  Anna Bager: Yeah. In the end, that's where it really can help. That and content creation. Of course, you just have to be very careful with AI because you really need to know where the data is coming from and how it's being used and be able to argue that if somebody were to challenge you, right? There's a lot of privacy, and regulatory murkiness around the whole thing. So you gotta be responsible and try to know what you're doing when you're using it. But obviously, it's an incredible tool.  You mentioned earlier, that this is an election year, which no one can't help but know that these days. I'm curious in terms of budget and financials and forecasts and everything else, does a presidential election year have to be weighted in terms of every four years, there's a bit of an anomaly in terms of spend and then we go back to normal?  Anna Bager: Obviously big elections, definitely there's so much more money on the market, but out-of-home as a platform is great, every two years there's an election, there's a lot of local elections all the time, there's a lot of advocacy groups and others that are out there with political messaging and our platform lends itself really well to that. Out-of-home is not just an advertising platform, it's also a platform for public service messaging. A lot of that, right? And we're there, we can reach any consumer. Consumers who might not trust the media, who might not speak the language, whatever it might be, you can put a message up and reach them through signage. Political advertising, depending on how you defend it, I think it's a growth area for out-of-home and something that's not on or off, but obviously this election is also how it's happened, right? There's a lot going on at the very end. I think for everyone, it's a huge opportunity and then we'll have to deal with the aftermath of whatever that might be.  Oh boy, hopefully not too much of an aftermath.  I've been over in Europe a couple of times at conferences in the past year and speaking on panels and one of the things that would come up over and over again was sustainability which is a huge issue in Europe for digital out-of-home companies and all digital signage operators and I was asked, "What's happening in Canada and the US?” And I said, it's nowhere near the issue. I'm curious what the OAAA's take is.  Anna Bager: Oh, we have a sustainability task force. We are very closely monitoring what's happening in Europe. We have a lot of members or not a lot, but we have a few members that have operations there too. I think it's not as much of a focus here as it is in Europe, but I think it will be, and if you look at big global brands and agencies, they are going to ask for a better insight into how sustainable something was. So you need to pay attention to it. I think what's interesting with out-of-home is though, we might see him as a non-sustainable medium because you drive cars or you ride on airplanes or, But given that we are a one to many media, one ad can reach so many people, and it sits up there for a reasonably long time and it pretty much always reaches an audience, and it doesn't consume as much electricity or power as a lot of other media, in particular, digital does, the production of the ads can be very efficient. There's something called the Green GRP. We are probably the ones who are best positioned there. We are far more sustainable in other media formats. So what we're focused on is how we better tell that story without greenwashing, and how we can help our members grow with the increasing demands that will come both from the government and from the brands and the agencies around these issues. So I think it's important. I also think it's important, right? Like whether you believe in it or not, there's definitely something going on with the environment. So it's good to be protective of it, and I think our industry is very responsible. A lot of our members, even if they're in the US have sustainability officers and are constantly looking at how we can improve and make our industry better from that perspective.  So no, it's a very important thing for us, and we are really looking into both who we can partner with and also what's going on in other markets, to see if we can learn.  Is the adoption of the change going to be driven somewhat by starting to understand the impact on power bills and realizing, Oh yes, we can do work to address climate change, but we can also reduce our operating costs?  Anna Bager: Sometimes, probably yes. There can be efficiencies and that's always good, but I think it really depends. I don't think everything reduces the operating costs, but some might, and then that's a form of sustainability too. Yeah, I think you should take all things into consideration.  I think it's definitely something everyone should be aware of and take a close look at how they're running their operations, and see if they can make changes.  I met recently with a company that does specialty displays, primarily focused on the digital out-of-home market and one of the things they're tinkering with is large format e-paper displays. So very energy-friendly. I know e-paper quite well, I've been looking at it for years and years. It's getting quite good but there are compromises in terms of color reproduction and everything else, and I asked, what do the brands think of this? Are they fine with it?  And I was surprised to hear that, yeah, they get it. They understand we don't have maybe the exact color reproduction that we want, but it does other things for us.  Anna Bager: That's a great example. You don't let perfection get in the way of good, or whatever it is that you say. Look, we all have a common interest here, and I think if there's something that you can use that's more efficient or more sustainable, maybe less costly, I think that's a good way to convince the brand to do so. That's good news, I think.  It's also smart to go and ask them for us before developing something, saying here, “Look what we did”, and then they go, “Yeah, I don't like that.” Anna Bager: That's a a very good point, for sure.  Happens all the time, but people keep doing it.  Anna Bager: That is true.  Alright, thank you for your time, this was great.  Anna Bager: Thank you, this was really nice and good to speak to you.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I was buzzing around the InfoComm trade show earlier this year, I stopped at one stand for a chat, looked at the next stand over, and saw some familiar faces from Poppulo - the rebranded name for a company long known in digital signage industry circles as Four Winds Interactive. I went over and got caught up on what the company was up to and why it was showing at InfoComm, as I had grown in recent years to regard Poppulo - right or wrong - as being primarily focused on omnichannel workplace communications. I was mostly wrong, though I think it is fair to say that in the wake of a private-equity backed merger of Four Winds with an Irish company that did employee communications, there was marketing more noise for at least a while on the workplace side. David Levin, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Four Winds, stepped back from that role almost a year ago now, and I had been wanting to do a podcast with new CEO Ruth Fornell, whose background was well  outside the signage and workplace comms industries. After a preliminary chat, and me saying I'd poke away at her about digital signage stuff, she suggested I'd be in better hands with Joe Giebel, who has been with the company almost 20 years and is its Senior VP of Digital Signage. Joe and I get into a bunch of things in our chat, including the journey of blending technologies and culture, and the shifting needs and profiles of customers. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Joe, nice to catch up with you. It's been a while. Can you tell me what your role is at Poppulo?  Joe Giebel: Yeah, absolutely. My current role is Senior Vice President of Digital Signage, which is a fresh title for me. I'm coming out as a vice president of sales for America's role, where I've been fortunate to lead a number of our sales teams. For those who don't know Poppulo, there, a lot of the digital signage folks will probably know you or know the company more as Four Winds Interactive, but that changed, what about five, six years ago now?  Joe Giebel: That's right. I think we did that in 2021. So not too long ago, but, yeah, let me give a little bit of a history.  Four Winds Interactive was founded in 2005 as a digital signage company and remains so, but right around 2020, we started looking at different opportunities to enhance our offering, and made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was a company called Poppulo, which was the best-in-class enterprise, internal communications tool. So we brought them into the mix and when we did that, we started to look at the names, like how do we go to market and how do we want to do business as, and so we started doing market studies and it turns out that the name Poppulo, which loosely comes from a Latin term for the term “people” resonated and we decided to change the name to Poppulo. Four Winds Interactive serves as a parent company. We do business as Poppulo and the name Four Winds Interactive was always interesting and people wanted to know what's the origin of that name and its significance, and there wasn't a big story there. So I think we were open to considering a new brand and look and feel, and that's the story, Dave.  Yeah, if we go way, way back to almost 20 years ago, Four Winds kind of got its start with those little semi-electronic touch panels that you would play back samples of music, right? Joe Giebel: That is correct, and they were dealing with specialty media. So there was a company called, Four Winds Trading. That company was dealing with specialty media and a lot of it had to do with native tribes. So the Four Winds related there a little bit more. During that business, they started to think about how do we get loyalty around the distribution of our media titles and different things that we're distributing, and of course, screens were new at the time and media in an interactive format is very engaging, and so they were looking at how we merchandise this with technology?  And out of that was born the concept of digital signage and Four Winds Interactive. You go back, I believe right to the beginning to the rented mansion house in downtown Denver, right?  Joe Giebel: I actually predated the mansion where we had a corner of the warehouse, for our sister company, in Arvada, Colorado, and, yeah, that was in 2005. I think I was certainly a single digit, I think I was the fifth employee in the company and I got to be there from the beginning and started to see what markets will digital signage be valuable in and, where should we target people and it was an incredible time.  So if we go to today, I bumped into the Poppulo stand at Infocomm, and admittedly, and I said it at the time, I was kind of surprised to see the folks there because you being a little bit absent, I would say from the trade show circuit, or at least from the circuit that a lot of the other CMS software companies show at, so it struck me as almost like the company was getting back into digital signage a little more seriously, but I was told, and I suspect you'll say the same thing that no, we never left.  It's just that, maybe we're kind of amping up marketing again.  Joe Giebel: Yeah, I would agree with that, we never left. When we went through our acquisition period, we had a lot of great new tools and we were looking at how do we adjust what we're putting to the market and what are the right arenas to play in. Distracted is not the right word, but it's probably close. We were dealing with a lot of things and not to lie about trade shows following the pandemic. We're a little bit quieter and I think potentially we were being smart with our budget and certainly had some areas to apply it.  We missed the trade show circuit, and this year, we're jumping back into it and it feels good.  My impression, and you can correct me was post-acquisition of Poppulo and kind of merging the companies. It seemed reflected in part in online marketing and so on, or what I would hit on the website that you were focusing more on workplace experience and, maybe not making as much noise around digital signage, perhaps because that was established. Joe Giebel: Yeah, we brought in these new channels. We started to look at the workplace and the way we communicate with employees in a broader sense, and I think you could look at one of our major focus areas is the workplace and employee experience, and we started to say: as the world moves to remote work, and then we've kind of swung back to hybrid, and it looks like, there have been some big splashes in a full return to office by some major organizations, digital signage was a channel that we think is extremely effective in pushing a message, but we wanted to be able to reach people in more ways, and we do that now through a multi-channel approach, which includes the ability to reach employees by email, the ability to land messaging and collaboration tools, and still maintain the scale and governance that you want from an enterprise tool. So I'd say we're multi-channel. Digital signage is near and dear to my heart, and I think we're about to see a major pushback into how we drive that employee experience through digital displays, as more and more people come back to the office, it becomes a mandate.  Was it a little worrisome because of the whole idea of, okay, everybody's just going to work, from home from now on and I saw lots of software companies doing the equivalent of desktop screensavers, ways to push messaging to people who are now working at home instead of coming into an office.  So did you guys have to kind of look at things and go, okay, this could be a problem if we're not kind of broadening our offer? Joe Giebel: I think we saw an opportunity and, one, we saw an opportunity to make the digital signage for those frontline workers and the people that didn't have that option to go home even stronger, and at the same time we always had that question. How do we better engage people who aren't in the offices where we are putting our displays, maybe their field workers, maybe they travel constantly, or maybe they work from home? I think that really brought it to the forefront. Luckily, we were in the process of figuring out how to extend or create extensibility within the platform, ahead of everybody leaving office buildings. So we felt like we had a good foot forward, and we're all in on how to provide the best possible platform to reach your audience now. I struggle to say we're entirely workplace-focused because we also have a lot of people doing customer-facing things. So it truly is understanding your audience, what are the things you want to enable or shape their behavior with and what's the best way to reach them, we really want to be that platform for our clients and it's about value, you know, what is it you hope to affect or inform and what's the best way to do it.  When you say customer-facing, how do you define that?  Joe Giebel: Yeah, I need to get information in front of people who may purchase from me or interact with my solution. So I look at my clients and you know the classic use case is a retail environment. Obviously, you've got customers coming through a retail environment. What I don't think always gets thought of is that lobby of big headquarters. Many of our clients are bringing customers and. partners through their spaces that are customer-facing as well or major delivery centers. If you've got people building very expensive items, they often have delivery centers where they bring clients in both pre-sale and post-sale, to understand here's that product you're going to invest in over the next two, three, ten years, through that partnership, and then you look at things like executive briefing centers, very similar.  How do I bring my client base and prospects into an environment where I can show off what we do? In the market, I want to be able to show that in a number of ways. Digital, obviously, is an outstanding way to show use cases and product information, and really shape an experience when you have your customers in your space. Tell me if that was a good answer for what you were hoping to define. You did fine. Since more and more in the marketplace, larger customers, whether you want to call them enterprise or choose a name, are looking to slim down the number of vendors that they have, and they would like one vendor to do multiple things. Have you found that with some of your established clients that maybe you started with the workplace communications piece that they've then asked about doing large video walls, things like that, and on the flip side, maybe, whether it's an airline or an automaker, I'm thinking of some of your clients, more established clients. Have they said, yeah, we'd now like to also do workplace communications. Do you do that?  Joe Giebel: Yeah. First of all, if we make our clients successful, naturally, those teams that manage whatever solution they're implementing are getting questions from their peers on, how do I do that? You know, can you help me, and, who's your partner making this possible? So we see expansion across the products they own and new use cases. As you mentioned, maybe they're doing employee comms on screens and then it becomes large video walls and experiential things, maybe it's facilities related to meeting room signs, wayfinding, et cetera.  To the other element of your question, they're also saying if that partner is making us successful, where else can we use them? They do want to consolidate solutions to one vendor that they have success with. That's the biggest question that comes up with my clients. If I invest in you, how are you going to guarantee this solution is successful? And my team sees an ROI and it's not another tool that goes unused. So without a doubt, there's a desire, I believe, by Finance and IT to consolidate technology and vendors, as much as possible, especially if there's a track record of driving a return on the investment and making teams successful. I'm guessing the conversations are very different than they were, 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago, in terms of. I would say in the past, in the history of this digital signage was sold and people were interested in, from the idea of the kind of the sizzle of the screens, the visual elements of it and these days, instead of talking to marketing people, you're talking to IT people and they care about security and they care about data integration, things like that, is that accurate?  Joe Giebel: That is 100 percent accurate and I think you highlight in 2005, when we started the screen had such a sizzle, most homes didn't have flat-screen TVs. We were talking about plasmas back then. The iPhone didn't exist. So the concept of a touch screen and a large flat screen display, made life a real fun for digital signage.  Now the screens are more common. security and value, are kind of the table stakes to get into the game and where you really start to differentiate, you you understand the use case and how that is going to benefit a company, whether you're increasing productivity, reducing risk, and is that apparent? And do they understand how you're going to deliver that? And then on the security side, you almost don't get to pass go if you don't have a security posture that can scale globally, and, provide a safe feeling. I don't even think they have worries, right? You just don't do business with a vendor that's going to create worry, they've either got the security you need or you move on.  Yeah, and I mean, at least historically, I'm not sure where you're at right now, but historically you had a very large casino group and you had a very large Airline and those are two companies that have to be like, everybody has to be concerned about security, but they really care about security.  Joe Giebel: They do. It's paramount, obviously it presents a ton of risk. If you don't have that secure environment that matches their standard and those two examples, especially within the gaming world, those are tremendous partners of ours that kind of walked us through: Here's where you need to be, and we're so fortunate to have worked with them, and been able to develop that security posture with them in real world scenarios.  If you haven't set up gaming integrations and received gaming licenses. That is an in depth process that most of your leadership gets to go through and they get into personal stuff, they do a great job of remaining secure  So if you're going to work with those kinds of whale clients, you got to be prepared for a lot of hand holding and a long process?  Joe Giebel: That is correct. They're going to look at everything. I mean, they will find if you've got an NFL pick thing going on internally and you somehow put that interface onto a website, they're going to find that and they're going to ask you questions on why you're running a gambling ring. It goes that in-depth. They will see your resumes, they're going to do background checks on most of your team. So, there is a process to it. it takes some time and they leave no stone unturned.  It's been a few years now. Was the process of blending two companies, and I believe it's actually three companies that were kind of blended together, was that a bit of a journey? Joe Giebel: It is absolutely. Our company for the early history, we bootstrapped it. We had a visionary CEO that founded the company with one partner and we were a tight-knit family that didn't have outside investors. Taking on outside investment was a journey, and an experience, and then as we acquire, these are new experiences for our teams and so it is a bit of a journey.  There's the whole business operations side of things and how do you get multiple systems to speak to each other? How do we blend processes and then you've got the cultural elements of bringing organizations together, and you have to balance all of that? The people need to remain happy, the systems have to work. So it was a process and if I look at my resume and time with these organizations, what an education it's been for the last 19 years.  Are there kinds of tribes, so to speak? I'm curious if the operation in Cork, Ireland, which was where Poppulo, came from. Is that the workplace side and are the people in Denver more focused on digital signage?  Joe Giebel: You know, that's part of the journey and the early stages of the journey you definitely have. I'll stick with your term tribes and people that have knowledge and quite honestly, comfortability with a certain way of doing business. Along that journey, you start to see that tribal element go away, and you start to see the company mesh and become one organization that grows, and so early on, Denver had to be the hub for digital signage. It's a, I don't want to say complex, but if you're used to selling a pure SaaS solution, and then you start to add in hardware and the different elements of digital signage, it's more than you're used to and without a doubt, I hadn't talked about email and corporate communications in that sense prior to the acquisition. So it took me time to understand it.  I would say now, our entire company is so excited about a multi-channel tool, that everybody's leaned into it at this point and we work cross functionally quite well. It extends the workday quite a bit.  I'm sure there was also a bit of a journey kind of massaging and figuring out the right message, because going to target customers and saying, we do this and we do this, and we also do this must've potentially left them a little cross eyed. Joe Giebel: Without a doubt. I think we've learned along the way, when to talk about. the channel for a client and when to focus on a specific offering, and that's a delicate dance as well to feel that out. Because not every customer understands our vision quickly, and they certainly don't share the excitement that we have over new stuff because it's not at the forefront of what they do every day. So you can absolutely create a ton of confusion, and we probably did that, in the early process of coming together as Poppulo.  It probably feels like you're trying to sell them more stuff.  Joe Giebel: You know, as a sales guy, I'm probably insensitive to that, but, yeah, absolutely. You kind of get that sense when someone's sniffing out a salesperson coming into the room, and I bet we did pass that as well.  At the end of the day, we are trying to sell more stuff, but if we can't illustrate what the value is and why it makes sense to buy more solutions from us, we haven't done our job and we're probably not going to win that. So at the end of the day, we really do want to try to enhance the offerings and drive value to our client base.  You also have an office now in Bangalore, India. Is that a Dev team or a remote Dev team?  Joe Giebel: You know, we've got a number of functions, including development in Bangalore and that's an exciting market. I just saw endless content about how important digital signage is in India, and so we were excited to open that office up. I think it's been open for several months. We held our grand opening last week, but we've got a great team there, including a lot of technical folks and so we're very excited about that expansion.  But it's sales as well? It's not just purely, what would be perceived at least as being lower-cost, software development than what you would pay in North America.  Joe Giebel: Correct. It's not purely an offshoring effort. We see some strategic elements there. We've always provided technical experts to support our clients 24/7. That certainly helps the effort. We used to do that from Denver and have people working through the night. We now have folks in support as well in Bangalore.  The work culture in India, I think opens up a ton of possibilities for any digital signage vendor. That's looking at how do I enhance the workplace and employee experience within an office. I think that's going to be a tremendous market.  Yeah. I mean, it's a vast market. I suspect the challenge is based on the emails and pitches I get from people that the expectations on cost for SaaS licensing, software, and so on are somewhat lower than they are in North America. Joe Giebel: It's interesting, and some of the organizations there, that's a tough game if you don't have scale in what we're talking about, oftentimes though, if an organization is looking at this correctly, they're looking to roll out at scale and obviously we can build in better commercials that way, to better understand that, but without a doubt, as we look at a number of our clients are truly global, you do feel that pressure, as you go region to region, and that's an interesting thing you've got to handle, and try to solve for.  Do you have a client who you're allowed to talk about, because often the larger ones, it's difficult to get any permissions, that kind of really reflects the full meal deal of what you can do in terms of workplace, venue-based, customer-facing digital signage, maybe staff facing digital signage, like the whole shoot and match?  Joe Giebel: You know, I think Delta Airlines is a great client that takes advantage of most of our solutions, and then especially within digital signage, they've got so many use cases that they deploy both employee-facing, above wing for the passengers and below wing for the employees. So I think that's a good client that, we're fortunate does a lot of speaking about the solutions and is someone we can discuss.  Yeah, you've had them for a long time, right? Like, at least a decade.  Joe Giebel: That is correct. Long-term client. They started out with employee comms, and they've won a number of awards in the industry for some of the innovations that they do. I believe last year we started rolling out passenger-facing applications broadly for flight information displays.  Yeah. I did a podcast with Ryan Taylor going back about three years or something, and I've been seriously impressed by what Delta is doing. Because they totally get it, you can use screens really help inform the passenger journey and from the moment you walk into the check-in area all the way post-security. What was really intriguing was what they were doing, as you said, below the wing with, ramp information screens that are talking to the guys who are heaving bags into the planes and everything. Joe Giebel: Yeah, that's right. It's heartwarming when you see them roll out, one Ryan, leads a team that focuses on a number of things. Digital signage is a large part of it and they all understand what use cases and applications we can leverage digital screens for to help our customers and our employees. But when you see images of a 30-year pilot pulling up to a gate, and the ramp information display is saying, thanks for your work and dedication to Delta, and you know, that pilot's retiring it. That's a cool use of the technology, and it feels good that they think that's helping them build their culture and recognize people. It's awesome to see that in use, and in context like that.  The industry obviously has evolved quite a bit over 20 years. I'm curious about what you're seeing these days that you're seeing more and more customer demand for, I suspect it's things like data integration.  Joe Giebel: Yeah. I think data integration is the key and trying to understand, how do we make these things real?  The industry is asking for, it's odd when I hear it, I want consumer grade. Because I think 15 years ago you wanted everything to be the commercial grade which seemed to mean Strength quality, you know now they're thinking about the experience and consumer-grade is the goal. Consumer grade meaning I want it to react and be as simple As you know, maybe a social media app, and what I experienced on my personal devices need to be intuitive and need to be smooth. There can't be a need for training on how to interact with this thing. So, part of that is data integration. Is the data automated? Is it near real-time, and accurate? And are we putting the right data in front of people that they want? And you've got to have flexibility on that integration side because oftentimes, we'll see things get deployed and we see behaviors driven and it's like, wow, we didn't predict our clients and us and our project teams will say, we didn't predict those results. Let's tweak this and this to get back towards what we were driving and that flexibility and data integration, I think is the cornerstone of being able to deliver that experience. You have a platform you call Harmony. Is that the piece that kind of stitches together the different components versus, yeah, I just want the digital signage thing or I just want the email marketing thing?  Joe Giebel: That's right. So as you start to think about all these channels coming together, we call that platform harmony and it is a multi-channel, omnichannel approach to putting content really, I want to say communications, but, let's say getting content in front of the right people at the right time, and it gives you that ability to broadcast across every channel, or maybe you're using our analytics to say, “Look, we know these disconnected workers are not looking at the email, so we don't need to address them with email, that's creating too much noise.” So that concept or that name of Harmony, is the concept of all these channels coming together in harmony within an organization.  Without giving away business details, I'm curious, what percentage of customers are using Harmony versus those who still just want the traditional workplace comm stuff and those who just want digital signage for their retail environment or whatever it may be? Joe Giebel: Yeah, we've got a massive client base. So I would say about 10 percent of them are taking advantage of multi-channel, and on what I would just define as the Harmony platform, and I would say we've probably had serious conversations with about 80 percent and are working with them on plans for which channels might make sense. Oftentimes you've sold one solution to a team in the past, and that team's not going to necessarily handle that full digital strategy. So then it becomes a process of meeting the other stakeholders, showing them the value, and then planning how we roll this out. Because these are so highly visible, both digital signs, email, what we call feeds, putting messaging into collaboration tools, it's so visible that you have to be thoughtful on how you roll that out, how you plan it. So it takes a little bit of time.  I'd say 10 percent are the early adopters and taking advantage right now and it's certainly something we evangelize across the client base.  I suspect the leadership team likes that situation because there's a lot of growth potential there.  Joe Giebel: Yeah, we absolutely love it. The question then becomes, and what we've been working through quite honestly, for the last two years. How hard do you push on a platform play? And then how hard do you focus on nurturing the existing solutions and making sure that the teams that originally bought them aren't getting flooded with, “Hey, here's a shiny new toy.” And they're getting the adequate focus from us on how we make you most successful, within what you own and what are your expansion plans for that singular solution.  So there is a balance and, honestly, it might come across as a little disrespectful, if you don't pick up on what the client needs in the moment and we don't mean it that way. But you got to have your ears open, and stay customer centric, as you kind of navigate those waters.  All right. This is great. Good to catch up. if people want to know more, they'll find you just at poppulo.com?  Joe Giebel: Poppulo.com is the best place to reach us and you'll start to see all those solutions, both from an individual, description and promotion, as well as here's how all these channels play together. All right, Joe. Thanks again!  Joe Giebel: Dave, great catching up. Thank you.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Projection has always been something of a fringe player in digital signage because of a series of technical barriers to adoption, most notably the limited operating life of the lamps, and the product and labor costs of switch them out. Laser projection has addressed that issue, but the other one that's harder to conquer is dealing with ambient light. Unless the projector is the size of a fridge, super-bright and seriously expensive, the environment's lights need to be off or dimmed and any windows covered. A startup called Obsidian Screens, based on the fringes of greater Toronto, has developed a projection screen that can show visuals that aren't washed out even with the lights on and the blinds open - and as the brand name suggests, the screens are black instead of white or silver. It's a super-thin laminated material light enough to marry with foam - like a poster with a 1/4-inch foam backing to make it rigid and ready to hang. Co-founder Chris Cavalieri and his business partner use Ambient Light Rejecting technology - something that's been around for years - but have their own "nanofilter" technology that does a better job, he says, of preserving projector brightness and visibility. And just as is the case with LED video walls, the more black on the display surface, the better the contrast. The company has been around for seven years, but remains quite small ... as they have struggled to find the right partners to specify, sells and deploy their tech. They've run into at least a couple of challenges - with end-users who were disappointed by conventional projection set-ups, and pro AV integrators who for logical reasons want to sell systems that cost a lot more and need ongoing paid support and services. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Chris, thanks for joining me. You're based outside of the Greater Toronto Area and you've been working for a few years now on a company called, well, a product called Obsidian. Can you run through all of that for me?  Chris Cavalieri: Sure thing. Thanks for having me, Dave. I really appreciate taking the time to talk about it and boy, do I have lots to say. You have half an hour. Go! Chris Cavalieri: All right. Perfect. No pressure. So Obsidian, I should probably talk a little bit about projection. So what we've been trying to do and we've been doing for a while, is trying to find a way to take all the benefits. So if anyone's in digital signage, I assume there's a few listening to this what incredible things can be done with projection. So things like projection mapping holographic displays, very unique, creative stuff, and it's absolutely fantastic, and when we started out, we looked at things and said, like, why isn't this used more?  You know, we go to retail stores, we're going to shopping centers and there are LEDs, we've got LCD video walls now and only a few set cases, maybe a performance or display are using projection to its full potential and it begs the question is why, and that why is how we found it, our idea of Obsidian, which is to create a solution to get those benefits projection and make it a lot more accessible and practical in place of, or as an option compared to say our elite typical LED signage and LCD video walls.  So, I mean, projection, it's very renovation friendly, it's very scalable, and depending on what projector you use, it can be quite a low cost, the benefits are endless, and compared to LEDs, which are quite glaring, most of the time, I'm biased, obviously, no shame in that, but most people don't want to stare at an LED board as a backing, screen for like a speaker stage, for example, casino games. We've talked to fellows in Vegas before. It causes fatigue for people who are near them for too long. And that's, that comes down to the human eye and there's a whole science behind it, the wavelength of lights and all that. I won't go into it. It works. It's bright. It gets people's attention, but it just doesn't give the same aesthetic as a good projection setup would.  So coming back to it, why don't we use projection? And quite frankly, it's because it mostly just sucks because it fails. You need to have a dark room, dim room, or very well-controlled lighting, and by having controlled lighting and those restrictions, designers or retail commercial designers can't do solutions they want to do where this challenge is like a window nearby and sunlight there are challenges that they can't overcome and maintain a good looking display and that's where LEDs kind of help punch through that.  So the question is what if we had a solution where projection can punch through that can give you those same benefits and versatility, but you can have nearby lights? You don't have to overly control your space. I mean, of course, you can't do shopping in a grocery store with your lights off or a shopping mall. You know, it's not practical. You might be able to do a half-hour show or presentation, but it doesn't make sense, and that's at least my conclusion personally, my experience is why we don't see more of these really cool-looking projection map displays than we do now. It doesn't work in most cases. When it does, it's great, but most of the time it doesn't.  So Obsidian is basically to solve that problem. we've got our own proprietary technology and IP around it, and we've designed a system that harmonizes the projector and the screen, and we include the lighting as well for nearby lighting to essentially use the nanofiller technology to work together and what I mean in a very blunt sense from that is that these systems will work independent of the environment around it. So if people have heard of light rejecting screens, ALR screens essentially you have a gray screen or a silver screen. It'll absorb about 50%-60% percent of your light in the room and that gives you contrast, which is great because it helps you have a more adaptable, flexible display.  What our system does is the same thing, but that absorption, instead of normally it'll absorb your projector. So your white becomes gray, silver, whatever it is. In our case, your projector can shine on the screen and your lights can shine near or on the screen and have no loss, so it will reflect off of it. It keeps its colors, it keeps its white balance, and then the ambient light that is basically using this filter will absorb completely, not just the 60%. Whereas everything else gets knocked down by 50%-60%, and it creates this really neat illusion and really efficient display where fundamentally it's the same as any projection system, but you can see all your colors just popping. You maintain your contrast and your white balance and it's almost like you've doubled the lumens in your projector, and we love this because this opened up an option for again, adding an accessible and affordable solution somewhere between a TV set, and an LED video wall, where again, you can have something that's highly visible. It's got wide viewing angles. It keeps its color resilient, but you can also be adaptive. So again seasonal renovations for a retail environment stores, places where you don't really want to control lighting or it's too much work to deal with it. Plus you can install the thing in under a day. I mean, we've hung screens in under an hour compared to perhaps weeks on a video wall. So maintenance costs and benefits are endless.  So that was our goal with Obsidian again. What is holding it back from creating unique creative solutions? And how do we overcome that in this nanofilter system? And I think most people are afraid of it because it wasn't easy to develop and there are restrictions to it. Again, it's got to work as a cohesive system, that scared people and got a lot of resistance, but boy, does it work.  You're an engineer. I'm absolutely not. For simpletons like me, the simpleton explanation would be that instead of this being a white or silver screen, it's a black screen, correct? Chris Cavalieri: It is a black screen. So if you turn your projectors off and look at it, it'll look kind of a charcoal gray, maybe a little bit of a greenish tint to it, and you know, that's kind of like a decorative wall panel, and that's what it looks like. That's what it is, and that's because the light is bouncing off, it's still being absorbed. Their eyes don't have the nano filters in them. If you wear polarized sunglasses, you might, it might be interesting but that's essentially what's going on there. So it is indeed a dark-colored screen.  When you describe it as a system, you're talking about the kit of parts, but your part is the screen. The challenge with projection and the reason. It wasn't it hasn't really grown very much in digital science or anywhere else used to be with the projector and the lamp life and how you'd have to replace it all the time and it was unreliable and also that it wasn't very bright. Lasers have changed that. other technologies have improved. So that side is somewhat conquered. However, if you want a very bright projector, you're getting something the size of an Austin Mini. But, the screen thing is still by and large a white screen, right? Or film that you apply to a window glass that will make an image appear, but it's not very sharp or bright, I mean.  Chris Cavalieri: Exactly. I mean, that's the only solution people had to date is to get a bigger projector, and what's really unique about using our nano filter technology is you don't need a brighter projector to achieve the same result as you would. So there's almost a savings. I mean, I don't want to just say upfront savings, there is maintenance still involved, laser projectors have been a huge benefit to the industry on that front. They still need to be replaced eventually. But by using these filters and creating this super high-efficiency system effectively, it's not just the screen, it's the pairing of the projector and the screen. You can add the lights optionally as well. That allows you to use about half the lumens you would require in just a punch-through projector to achieve the same visible results that same effective brightness called legibility, of the display, and you're getting a little bit higher contrast because the screen is naturally darker than a white canvas or a white painted wall. Is it front projection or rear?  Chris Cavalieri: Front projection right now. We do have a prototype of the rear projection. It does work. We were working with the Art Gallery of Ontario at one point on a display which was kind of fun, so we almost accidentally made it just out of curiosity. There is a rear projection system for it. It's got, it's. own little challenges and restrictions, mostly just size, I say it's the only thing remaining. So while we don't offer it as an off-the-shelf product at the moment, customized solutions, that is something we can whip up together and it does work quite well. So is this almost like an architectural material that you could use instead of wallpaper or something if you wanted a projection surface in a retail environment or whatever? Chris Cavalieri: Absolutely. In fact, at one point, we had a version where we put an adhesive on the back instead of, we normally use PVC foam just to keep it rigid for hanging on the wall and we called it digital wallpaper and I know TV sets have tried to replace that and transparent LEDs, but absolutely this the screen itself is only about a millimeter thick. It is flexible so you can wrap it on columns, you can create decorative panels, and again, it does have a nice finish to it. You can route the edges, it's cuttable, machinable, you name it, and from an architectural standpoint, yeah, it's perfect. I mean, decorative panels, unique shapes. You can do multiple shapes in an array. You can make it continuous, join them together, and project whatever you want, and even when it's off, it'll have that kind of charcoal gray, very soft, it's a glare-free canvas finish to it like a print, and it definitely works. Could you print on it?  Chris Cavalieri: Yes. We haven't done it, but because it's built as a laminate, there was a layer on the front layer that we'd be able to print on the back of before it's assembled. So yeah, we could print a still image into it or a texture, maybe like a woodgrain pattern to it onto that one layer, stick it together, and embed a static image to it, which you could then nest to the digital content. That'd be really cool.  Is the front surface, the laminate part of it, is that like a fabric, or is that like an acrylic coating or something?  Chris Cavalieri: It's a polycarbonate substrate. So it's a kind of a semi-rigid plastic, a very thin layer, but there's a few layers. So it's kind of a blend of vinyl polycarbonate. We've got a few in there, but that top one would be a polycarbonate. So quite durable, quite resistant.  So you wouldn't have to rope it off or anything, people could be near it without being terrified that something's going to get damaged.  Chris Cavalieri: No, it's quite resilient. I mean, you can scratch it if you really try, but to break it or crack it is extremely difficult. What do you see as the primary use cases for it?  Chris Cavalieri: I mean, I've been dreaming of retail, commercial, public display, but honestly, I'm one person. I'm an engineer. I just want to get these in the hands of absolutely phenomenal designers, architects out there, and interior designers, to let them just run wild because it's so adaptable. In fact, you can shape it, you can wrap it, tile it, and do 3D shapes. Usually, when we go to trade shows we'll do like we have a pop can, it's like a cylinder and we put like a Pepsi animation on it and you can do arrays of different shapes together, and like the limits of creativity are endless. It's just like any good projection map and application. Get those into the right hands and it's a dream. So, I mean, I pictured grocery stores for advertising, to justify costs. So a lot of the time they have printed posters or a big mural at the back top of their store over their freezers and just put panels up. You have tons of ceiling space, running power, and signal to it, it's dead easy compared to like an led array for that size of display, and now you have a source of revenue, advertising, promotion of the week, whatever it is, and you have that control. So I mean, a store designer can really go to town because of that ease of use, ease of access, and the flexibility of a projection system, which now works by using our filters. What kind of challenges do you have around projection angles and things like that?  I gather we're talking, ahead of this a little bit, and I was asking about ultra-short throw projection and so on and there are some limitations around that, like you want to be a little bit further back in terms of the throw on the angle. Chris Cavalieri: Yeah, so right now, a short throw to a standard throw, and of course, long throws are all good for it. We have done some tests with ultra-short throws, unfortunately, the optics in the ultra-short throw right now do conflict with the optics in the laminate. So we can't use it with that at the moment. Although, secret R&D projects #1, #10 or #20. We are working on a potential solution to that, which should be independent of the projector that may work, but I won't say it will till I prove it. So let's assume it doesn't for now, for an ultra short throw, but again, standard throw and even short throw, long throw setups are all fine. That's what we recommend, and that's nice too, because that gives you, again, control over angles. We do play with the optics a little bit on the screen and it's part of our secret as well, we do narrow a bit of the vertical cone and bend light horizontally. So you have a more uniform viewing experience for things like foot traffic from left to right. So there is a restriction, but it's quite wide.  Most ALR screens, you might be able to see the thing at plus minus 30 degrees, sometimes usually less, where it comes down to a half-brightness angle. So we get very dark at an angle. Whereas ours actually, you can see funny enough, it's beyond 180 degrees, it gets brighter. That's steep, and it was really weird, totally not intended, but, so that's part of a little bit of the magic of our specific laminate that we've built is it has that really unique uniformity, kind of like paper, close to paper at all viewing angles left right around it. So there's a workaround. The challenge I've seen sometimes with projection systems is that they're great except when somebody needs to get up close to it or walk by and then there's a shadow and so on. So you can let's say in a corridor, a wide hallway, or something like that, you could mount this on like a track system or something like that and project down and people could walk by without, unless they're right in front of it, they're not going to, come into the shadow there? Chris Cavalieri: Yep. I mean, because we have that steep angle controlled on it, it can also affect bringing the projector into it. So we can have the thing off to the side. You can have it overhead. You can kind of project from steeper. So again, not quite an ultra-short throw, but that's because of the actual lensing in it. But a standard projector at a steeper angle will work quite well with that. So you have a lot of versatility and adaptability for that. Again, just making sure it's over people's heads, and by the time they block it, technically the advertisement, has done its job. So it's not too much of a concern on that front, but you can get away with quite a bit, and a lot of retail stores and public displays have lots of ceiling space to play with too. So it's very flexible there.  Do you have to monkey with the content in terms of how it's rendered or have particular software running on the media player or whatever to make all this happen, or it's a screen and point the projector at the screen?  Chris Cavalieri: That's why I love it because, I mean, ironically all the research we've done again, me and my colleague, both engineers, we love to keep it simple. So we've got a few projects on the go as well. Same idea, but all the software you need is the same that's already out there. It's projection mapping. Like that, nothing has changed. Nothing you learn there. If you know how to do projection mapping, or you have a team of guys who know how to do it, nothing's different. That's just content. All we do is you're putting the right projector with the right screen, and then you can see it. Simple as that.  So I wrote a piece a couple of years ago about an installation in London in a coffee shop, and it was a black wall with a kind of chalkboard, and they were putting the menu on that instead, well, on flat panel displays and it looked pretty cool, but the coffee shop was having to dim the lights and do everything else because there are windows and doors out to the street and so on.  If they're using your technology, do the lights have to be cranked down, drapes pulled, and all that, or it could behave as though, it is just being a regular shop? Chris Cavalieri: I mean, that's a perfect example, and that's exactly what we want to do, and in fact, we tried to approach McDonald's, Tim Hortons, and all that, and of course, they tell me to get lost because who's Obsidian, but that's just, it is, you don't need to turn your lights on.  Part of the founding purpose was, that Adrian, my colleague, kept tripping on everything in his classroom because he always had to turn the lights on and off and is prone to that he's always back and forth showing his slides and it's a safety risk. Even old age homes, we had approached at one point as well for they have movie theaters, they share and it's just not practical to do that, and like I said in the beginning, that's why projection isn't, and I wouldn't recommend using it in a lot of cases because if you're working as a barista and your lights are off, you can't see what you're doing. It's bad for your eye strain. If you're trying to focus look at what you're pouring, you're going to have accidents, you're going to slip, probably can't clean as effectively. And there's so many reasons you'd really need to have lights on for safety, if nothing else, and our screen will let you do that.  Again, we've had beams of sunlight across it, still keeping the thing readable. keep your lights on. I mean, there are things you can do to play with it. It depends on the projector you use, you'd use a brighter or dimmer one. You can control the lighting as well, and we do recommend it when you can, but you don't have to be quite as aggressive when you do it. So you can keep those lights on.  Part of the rise of the LED technology within workplaces has been the idea that in presentation theaters, big meeting rooms where more typically there's been a projector, but then the drapes are closed or a control room where the lights are very low so that you can see what's being projected on the screen. The idea was that a DV-LED would change all that. You could open the windows up and crank the lights and everything, and you'd be able to see what's on the screen with no problem. But the challenge is cost.  Chris Cavalieri: I mean, there's cost and there's also, I mean, with LED, do you want to see it? It's not very pleasant to look at for a long period of time. I mean, the concept is right. All these technologies have a purpose, and I'm not discrediting the value of LEDs like outdoor displays, and billboards, I mean, they punch through light. They're very good at getting through it. They're extremely visible. They'll get your attention. But they're just not pleasant to read, if that makes sense so in terms of a boardroom yeah, it could work, and I've seen stages done with full LEDs instead of a projection screen, and it's just unpleasant. Even if you're recording it, there are aliasing effects and a lot of unpredictable things you don't really expect. So it's one of those things that's good on paper, but in practical use is not great, and then the cost is the other end of it. So there's the cost to maintain it, install it, you have to calibrate it all those things because LEDs wear out, not no LED is the same when they come out of production, there's binning to them, all sorts of things to keep in mind. That was our other motivator with projection. These are my famous words. You don't have to blow your budget to blow minds, right? If you do something right with the right technology that's good enough, right? You got to know what your application is, know who your audience is, who's using it, and really understand and appreciate that and Obsidian was our way to say, look, you have another option. Because light ambient light is an issue. Architects absolutely love giant windows nowadays. A funny story about a university in Ontario that got millions of dollars to renovate their classrooms, I won't name them, and big giant skylight windows without drapes, funny enough, that would let the sunrise right in that window and really make the presenter glow at the front of the classroom and which also happened to have a projection screen, which was with white and not Obsidian, and let's just say it didn't end very well, and even the another Yoko university has used projection. They've put drapes on and with those giant lights, but they're not full block-out drapes. You know, they usually let a little bit of light in. Even with the drapes closed midday cloudy day, you still couldn't read the screen. So it is a major problem and aesthetically, the rooms look beautiful.  I mean, the architect is doing their job on that front. They're gorgeous buildings, beautifully renovated very nice aesthetics to them, but it's not functional. You need technology to overcome those challenges and to date, your only choice is to guess it is LED you either put up with it just squint or not reading it or you stick something expensive heavy bulky, and kind of blinding and you know now you can read it but you've also sort of made people uncomfortable in this space too. So you need another solution, and that's what we're hoping to do. It's an interesting predicament for companies such as yours in that you're offering what's presented as a better option and probably far less cost. But for the companies that sell into environments like higher education, corporate, public utilities, all that sort of thing, it's not necessarily in their business interest to sell them a cost-effective, low-maintenance solution. There's a lot more money to be made on the margin of one hell of a lot of LED and then calibration and support services and everything around it, as opposed to just selling them a display and saying, thanks, very much, call us at three years when you need a new projector.  Chris Cavalieri: Yeah, absolutely, and this has been driving me absolutely insane, to be honest. This projection system has existed for almost seven years now, and I still, we're still a startup. It says a lot. I mean, yes, we're engineers. We're probably terrible at sales and marketing and we are, but c'mon… You're not the first. Chris Cavalieri: It's just we've approached distributors, we've gone through universities, we've thrown sales in front of them practically, and the reality is in the end, you got to go where the money's at. They want something that's predictable. The use case is the same. The installation is the same, and the training for their technicians and the customer is the same. Everything's the same because once you've got your company up and running they're not wrong. It's expensive, change is expensive and it's risky, and nowadays no one wants to take that risk. They don't want to do anything different. You know, it might be better for the customer, but. I like my margins. You know, I need my income. I got to put food on the table. I got to pay my team.  Now, we're going to do this job because that's what we know how to do, and that's where we make money, and we understand that, and that's fine, but there's got to be someone who cares about the end user to find unique creative solutions find solutions to problems that You know, push the industry a little bit further and this has been an ongoing battle for years for us, and it drives me nuts.  So you're absolutely right that it's a paradigm for them if they're not used to working with it. If they do, it's a white screen and they know when and where it works, and that's the end of it. There's zero reception for anything else and I hope that changes.  I suspect there's a bit of a taint as well in that, a lot of larger environments will have used projection in the past and have the experience of going, “Well, God, I can't even see the screen properly, or anything else, so projections are off.”  So when that gets revisited, unless you have the opportunity to have a really high-quality conversation with them, they're thinking, well, shit, I'm not doing projection again. That was a mess.  Chris Cavalieri: Yeah. “Oh, we have used projection before. It didn't look that good.” The customer wasn't happy. You know, we can't have that, and I mean, that's valid too.  So is a better specifier or audience for your technology, quite possibly the architects and people who think about physical spaces and experience? Chris Cavalieri: I think it has to be, I think those are the only people that really get the experiential side of what you can do with projection, they have the vision they can see they have a basically working towards a solution, right? They have a client who wants something unique they're left to their creative devices to develop this solution or overcome a challenge and they need all the tools in their toolbox and the actual installers, the AV text distributors, but they're not the right people to do it. They're going to do business as usual. It's gotta be the people making the design decisions who can see something greater or want to do something, and previously, let's say they couldn't, that's where proceeding could fit in. So getting it in front of them, and that's something we're trying to do as much as we can network. That's also been challenging because these people are hard to find. I think I waited four months for a meeting at one point and met an interior design firm, and in the end, they didn't know or want to hang a TV set, so it wasn't a commercial designer, more of an interior designer, the right people are out there, and those are the people that, again, the architects, designers, those are the solution providers that really need to get their hands on this.  It sounds like along with the physical cost of the substrate or screen or whatever you want to call it, there are really minimal additional costs in terms of a mounting system you don't need to go to the sorts of mounting systems that would be used for DBLED or LCD anything else. There's not all that metalwork, right? It's just this piece of foam that hangs on a wall, like a poster that you get foam mounted. Chris Cavalieri: That's exactly it. That's what we tell everyone. If you hang it, you just hang it like a poster or a mirror or a print, and it's all adaptable too. Again, we do a lot of customization. So we can put the French cleat on, and hang it on your wall. What we love about that PVC foam is it's you can superglue hard points onto it from this very inexpensive and very lightweight, let's say like a 24-inch by 54-inch panel, so 4.5 feet by 2 feet, is I think about 8 kilograms, basically per panel and put a cleat onto it. We've screwed into it. We've put hooks to hang off of for summer trade shows, for portal displays. You can screw into it, you can cut it, shape it, layer it, can thicken it, or thin it, it's very versatile for the installer and whatever the application is.  So to really get our goal, the whole vision of the city is to remove barriers, remove restrictions, and that's a mounting system we've enjoyed because it really harmonized with what we're trying to achieve lightweight. It's just no metalwork. It doesn't take weeks. It takes under an hour. You just hang it on your wall. You can butt them together. Done. Very simple.  So you're a startup. So I assume there's not a cast of thousands working at the company?  Chris Cavalieri: Nope. We've got two and a dog, we're very small. I mean we've got a few people out there who are kind of advocates for us as well. So we've networked that way. We've got a really great PR guy as well who is helping us out network to the States, and Canada. He's absolutely fantastic. So we've officially the team is two, but we've got a number of people helping us. We've had some advisors we've worked with locally as well, from the university and then the forge and Hamilton as well, for example. So we've got lots of support, so we're a small team, but we're quite effective at what we do, and we've got contract manufacturers.  We have a whole network in China if we really had to go down the road for volume production. So we see a path to mass production very quickly if and when we get to that point, but we're still two people at the moment. Your biggest challenge is just the simple thing of awareness and finding people who get what you've got.  Chris Cavalieri: That's it. I mean, it's spreading the message, and I mean, anyone who's done a startup knows how hard it is. Anyone who's been an engineer or even not an engineer knows how hard it is to push a product on someone. It's sort of forbidden, forbidden knowledge to do that, and we've tried and iterated our design many times.  For example, we've made a home theater projection screen you can buy at Walmart right now. We have an adaptation of this technology for home use because during COVID everyone was at home. No one's putting signs in. I mean, we're very adaptable, flexible, and I mean, that's the benefit of being a very small, but creative, dynamic team is you can do these things we have the technology, we have to know how to do it and frankly, we love design and we love creative challenges. So that's something we do and we'll continue to do.  Are there any sort of caps on resolution or anything like that? Like, I don't really understand screen technology. If somebody has a 4k output, that's what's on there, that doesn't really matter.  Chris Cavalieri: Yeah. So the resolution is all just coming from the projector itself. So it depends on the projector you choose. I'd say the only limitation, people listing stuff as like a 4k projection screen is just. Throwing jargon at you to make it sound cool. It's, plastic. It'll be stretch vinyl or painted vinyl. The only thing that might affect your resolution in general is if the screen has a high texture in it. So sometimes there are some optical screens for an ultra-short throw, for example depending on the size of those you might see speckling or something at a certain resolution. That's the only thing I can think of you could justify putting a resolution to a screen, but we don't have that..  So if people wanna know more, where do they find you online?  Chris Cavalieri: So I mean, you can dig me up on LinkedIn, but obsidianscreens.com would be a good starting place. Shoot me an email, and then my name's Chris Cavalieri, should be on the screens look me up on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message. We got Facebook, we got YouTube, you name it. So save screen technologies wherever you can find them.  All right, well thank you for your time.  Chris Cavalieri: Yeah. Thank you so much, Dave. It's great to talk with you, and I hope we'll get to see you soon. Well,  We'll see what I can do.  Chris Cavalieri: I'll show it off. I hope all my words live up to it in person.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT LED video wall technology is now so pervasive, and there are soooo many vendors, that it is increasingly hard for manufacturers to differentiate and compete. That's compounded by a lot of manufacturers selling on specs like pixel pitch, and the form factor of their products. Very few, however, spend much if any time talking about the why and what of video wall projects - as in why is this project being considered, what's it for, and also what's going to be on the screen when it gets plugged in. So I was intrigued when I was in touch with Chanan Averbuch, a South Florida LED industry vet. I learned he'd left his longtime executive sales gig with an LED display vendor to join a spinout that makes premium LED displays, but leads with creative. The company is called Blue Square X - with the X being short for experience. While most manufacturers just make the stuff, and ship it to integrators, Blue Square plans to bridge a couple of gaps - acting as consultants and producing creative for digital experiences ... with integrator partners doing the final install. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Chanan, thank you for joining me. We've traded messages on LinkedIn and everything else and as we were saying before I turned on the recording, we probably had a brush by, “Hey, how are you doing?” I think at some trade show, but we haven't chatted at length. Can you tell me what your company Blue Square X does, because I'm unfamiliar.  Chanan Averbuch: Sure. Blue Square, I guess you could more or less call it the parent company has been in business for over 10 years. But Blue Sqaure X is a relatively new venture, leveraging more of my background and my partner's background in the space, and inside Blue Sqaure X, I'm focused on the innovation side more so than anything else. So Blue Square X is displays that are 90 inches and larger on the LCD side, and on the LED side, everything from, 110 inches all the way to unlimited sizes. We have projects we're doing that are a hundred-foot-long LED walls and 40 feet high, concave, convex, curved, all that stuff.  But Blue Square X at the end of the day is not another led company. We're focused on the experience first, which means content first, software second, and LED third.  Yeah, which is quite different because, through the years I've had no end of companies, relate stories about how they sold big LED displays, had them installed and then the customer would look at them and say, “This is great, what should we put on the screen?” like an afterthought.  Chanan Averbuch: I've gotten that over the years, time and time again, somebody will have the brain fart of, “Wow, it would be really cool if we did a sports bar instead of a bunch of TVs, let's do LED.” Okay, and then two weeks before the grand opening, “Wait, what are we doing on this thing from 8 am to 4 pm when we're not watching sports games when there's no live sports?” So we did digital art in those spaces.  So you're, the terminology I use is, a solutions provider in that you're not a pure play integrator because an integrator doesn't tend to think about content or experience so much. There's the odd one that does, but for the most part, we put together the projects we deploy, maybe we manage them, but we don't really think that much about what's on the screen. Chanan Averbuch: Spot on. I think one of the key issues that I've experienced over almost the last two decades in the AV industry is that most of the channel has thought about how to move a box and has never really thought about what the client is trying to feel from an emotional perspective in a space.  What are they trying to create when someone walks into a space, when they leave a space, how do they want them to feel? I think in the era now where you're trying to get employees to come back to work, right? It doesn't matter if you're in the US, on the Democratic side or the Republican side, it doesn't make a real difference. If you want employees to come back to work, you have to give them a compelling reason for what it feels like when you come to the office beyond the barista, the coffee bar, and the cereal crap, you gotta have more of an experience too, oh my gosh, I love going to the office. It makes me feel a certain way, and that's where experience matters.  Do you find that many end users have their heads around what they want to do? Because I know from my consulting experience that I will ask customers what they want to do and why, and quite often they'll lean back in their chairs and think, I haven't really thought about that.  Chanan Averbuch: To be brutally honest with you, what was always my struggle for the last 13 years is trying to get people to understand what to try to make a space feel like, and I've been blessed in the early days now in Blue Square X, when we, in a very stealth mode, went to market, our first projects were actually luxury retail and it's not luxury retail where you would historically imagine where they have a big TV or big LED wall. It's now digital art being built. In an immersive space within luxury retail, there are several stores that we're going to be coming to live with soon with some beautiful case studies, very similar to what we're seeing in the real estate market.  We have a bunch of case studies about to come to market now as well for a luxury real estate sales center. So when someone launches a $100M or $2B project, they want to sell units fast. So having a projector in a sales center doesn't quite do it, but having an immersive theater and immersive LED wall with custom content where it looks like the waves are coming at you and things of that nature in a real way, not the 3D naked eye stuff. I'm talking about the real anamorphic content where it feels like you're buying into a lifestyle. When you're able to translate that, condo sales come along with it.  Quite often, I've also found that those customers who understand that kind of thinking, then have their heads snapped back when they start to understand the cost of doing that. Is there a lot of work in getting them over the line or do they just understand that this is a $100M development, yes, we're going to spend $250,000 on content or whatever the number is.  Chanan Averbuch: So it's funny that you say that because I think when I was personally going through my own journey and starting in this space, it was hard for me to explain that value, right? The good thing is, that we've already done in a very short period of time, some of these unique experiences where we're able to talk about the cost of capital, and the return on their capital, because in the world of real estate, for example, it's all about return on your investment. And they have interest payments in addition to principal payments that they owe to the bank. So the faster they sell units. The less they owe the bank.  So because we're focused more on the luxury and premium side, and they, I guess you could say the true experiential environments, the price is not necessarily as much of an issue. As the expression goes, price is only an issue in the absence of value, but because we're not trying to sell an LED screen. We're talking about the experience, we're talking about the content first, the software, how to get it there, and the LEDs, how you display it. It's a different conversation that we're having. We're talking usually to the marketing folks. We're talking to the innovation people. We're talking to the people who say, how am I going to get my ROI? And it's very easy to map that out, and that applies in luxury retail. That applies in real estate, and even because we're focused on the channel still looking with larger AV integrators, we're working with the AV integrators to help translate that value into how it's going to pan out and what it's going to do for their consumer or their buyers, whoever it is in their environments. So when you say you're working with the AV integrators, you wouldn't describe yourself as an integrator that's competing with them for business but as more of a partner?  Chanan Averbuch: Correct. So, thank God I've been very blessed with working with the AV channel to do control rooms, do experiential environments. That still has not changed for me. The only real difference in what we're doing in Blue Square X is that we are being engaged directly with the sports teams, we're being engaged directly with the architect or the interior designer, and then they'll say, who can execute this with us in addition to the Blue Square X pro services team, right? We don't run data cables. We don't run power. We don't put pressure on systems. That's not our business. We're not pretending to be an AV integrator. We're still going to be partnering with the AVI SPLs or the AVI Systems or the Diverifieds of the world, et cetera.  Okay. So you would quite possibly maybe own the customer, so to speak, but you're not doing the whole solution stack, you're gonna sub a partner with, I don't know, pull a name out, AVI, SPL, or whoever it may be.  Chanan Averbuch: Yeah, and I think there's a huge value added to that too, because not just because they have 5 employees, it's because, oftentimes when I would historically get a call in, my previous job, it was, “something's not working”. Well, screens are usually pretty dumb, right? If the playback is not working, that may be a different story, or it's often like a hiccup in the crash drone or whatever the control system may be, and having that first line of defense as an integrator who's down the block, perhaps. It's a lot more valuable for me than to ship my team to Brazil, ship my team to Korea, or ship my team to Qatar. You mentioned your previous work and experience and so on. I was aware of you when you were working for an LED company. What is your background in this industry?  Chanan Averbuch: So I really started 13+ years ago with Primeview, and there I started as a Regional Sales Manager, then Business Development Manager, then VP, then SVP, then EVP. I was initially just trying to provide for my family. I guess it was like, it was a trunk slammer or whoever it may be. I tried to do business with you when I first started. I just had to put numbers on, and then as things evolved in 2017 and coming to 2018, I was able to pioneer the all-in-one space back in 2018 out of a sheer lack of resources, to be honest with you, on an engineering side. It was funny how that evolved. But the all-in-one category is something that, I'm very pleased to say, had some of my first, with Microsoft, with Citigroup, and some really substantial clients, and then as that all-in-one category evolved and from indoor to outdoor to 32:9, that's when all of a sudden I started realizing, wait when we get out of the 16:9, what happens to the content? How does that work? And that sort of just blew my mind, this whole content space, and I started developing that further, and that thesis when working closely with digital artists, and I have some amazing projects that are about to go live now within Blue Square X, where a lot of times we're getting pulled into projects where we're not even involved in the LED. We're not even evolving the playback. We're just doing the content, and if I could quote one of my great friends in the industry, Britton Gates from Newcomb and Boyd, he always asked me previously, and we're going to be doing this now: if there are so many people out there that could use help, Even if you're not doing the lead, are you willing to do that? And the short answer is yes. I want to help people create experiences, even if They're not buying our LED today.  Yeah, you could make the argument that the content side of the business is more interesting and easier on a company just because you're not having to worry about shipping and everything else associated with the hard technology. Chanan Averbuch: Oh, a hundred percent. I think the same line of logic would imply that if it's an inferior quality LED, and it's just like another OEM, it could also make my content look bad. So I can take from personal example, I was traveling this past week for a very high-end install that our team was doing, and in part of the travels, I remember going through the journey of talking about what the content is, and once we figured out that it had to be not SDR, but HDR, our team had to get on a frantic and run 32 cables instead of 16, right? So talking through the content strategy early on also impacts infrastructure, not just hardware, really. I anticipate that almost everything that you're going to see from 2024 and beyond is going to be HDR on the experiential side. Everything, because the blacks and the grays, it's day and night.  And what does that mean for existing deployments out there?  Is HDR backward-compatible, so to speak, or do you either have an HDR display or you don't? Chanan Averbuch: Good question. I think when you think back two years ago when people started really talking about HDR on the commercial side, not consumer, but on the commercial side, I think you had people talking about HDR, talking about what they call HDR-ready. This means some of the components can potentially work with HDR, but to go and truly retrofit or change the hardware to now be able to be HDR is not as simple as one may think, even though the marketing materials on that spec may have said previously HDR-ready, it's not truly HDR. So I think in reality, retrofitting certain sites to be HDR is going to be difficult. I think they're gonna have to understand that SDR is what they bought and it's either they upgrade all their hardware to go and be able to truly be compatible with HDR or they're gonna have to just settle and stick to SDR today, as sad as that may be. What would that mean? It's not like SDR is going to look bad. It's just HDR is going to look really good.  Chanan Averbuch: Correct. I think even if you look at consumer playback devices as simple as an Apple TV, right? Even Apple TV today is HDR-ready, and it really can play back HDR, but like we're doing now a significant amount of work in the home theater business, it's not a business that I was actually pursuing, and I'm now seeing these massive home theater projects with commercial integrators. Yes, they're residential integrators, but they're sometimes bigger than commercial projects, these home theaters.  I had to go down the rabbit hole of what a Kaleidoscope is and what real HDR playback is and cinema-quality playback. So really only once you're in this space and focused on delivering the high-end quality do you understand all these little peripheral devices for playback and content are so significant in the ecosystem. But unless you're in it, you don't know it.  One of the things that I concluded walking around ISE at the front of the year, and then Ifocomm again, was that the LED display market has matured to a point where just about everything looks really good. Yes, some companies come over from China with, purposefully, low-cost, material that looks crappy, even when it's optimized on our trade show floor. But in general, the stuff all looks really good. It's all sub one mil now and everything else. Have we hit the peak of this? Where does it go?  Chanan Averbuch: Great question. So I think to your point, I think when you talk about what's market has called mini-LED or COB or some of these more standard technologies today, the COB at a 0.7 look really freaking good. But even within those LEDs, the differentiator between HDR and really great quality scan rates that what I would say is considered broadcast quality or production quality or luxury retail quality, there's a differentiator in the market at that point, because one is good enough, and the other one is truly providing a higher level of experience, and what that means is the quality of the components.  So on a simple level, you have Nova Star, A6, A8, A10, et cetera, right? You have all the different Nova Star receiving cards, for example. The different receiving cards produce different quality results and have a higher level of spec. That's definitely the case for the mass market. I think there are ways to build materials to change things, and then there are also certain instances where having a higher brightness panel or LED bulb is great. Sometimes it's not good. You have to know the real application because it generates different heat. But in that instance, we've gotten certain projects now in the last few months where having a higher nit bulb helped. We have instances where they wanted a lower nit bulb because they wanted to not have to redo their infrastructure and energy and power, right? So they were repurposing LCD and they wanted to stay with LEDs and if they had gone with a higher bulb, they would have had the max power draws where you require more power.  But on the evolution of LED itself, COG, chip on glass, that's something that's going to be coming out soon. There are some other new things within the LED world we're about to be launching a product that's almost like an x-ray where you're able to print patterns on an LED and shine through it, but at a high resolution, not low resolution like you see on the market today. So there are definitely innovative ways of producing technology where just imagine a Calcutta marble, finish backdrop, and we print that Calcutta marble on a physical LED, and you're able to still protrude through it with a high brightness bulb LED. So there's a lot of these technologies that are about to come to market that we're working on, but it's from an innovative standpoint, not everyone else is doing it. How do we just be cheaper? It's what's the experience that we're trying to create, and then how do we solve that in a way that has never been done before. So when you talk about chip on glass, are you talking about micro LEDs?  Chanan Averbuch: Correct.  That is a horribly abused and misused term.  Chanan Averbuch: Yep. I try to shy away from the specifics of talking about COB GOB or SMD. I honestly try to focus on what's your environment, what are you trying to do? I'm fixing other people's problems now, just not on the content, but where someone sold SMD in a public space that should have been COB and in other environments where it should have been GOB to pretty protective solution. Like I just saw a curved LED that was so chewed up, I told the end user, you may consider replacing it completely. And he goes, with what? I said with a glue-on-board version, because otherwise you have to protect this thing, because it'll look like crap.  Through the years, I have seen some SMD stuff in public spaces and I thought, what in God's name were you thinking? Did you somehow magically believe that nobody was going to scrape this thing?  Chanan Averbuch: But in truth, it's not just about specifying the wrong technology. A lot of things that we're doing now at Blue Square X is because we realize other people didn't do it, and it's not just about the content or the software side. It's also about the trim kit the cladding and the framing. For example, one of my friends I was talking to at Leon Speakers, where we talked about the idea of hashtag framing every TV.  The idea of framing every TV is not just so that it looks aesthetically pleasing in a residential environment or in your conference room. It's also to protect it to a large extent. So when I think about framing, there was a project recently, it was comical that we recently lost ironically. And I thought it was great that we lost it. My partner was like, what do you mean we've lost it? I said I'm so happy we lost it. He goes, why? I said because the other guy is putting a product that's going to get destroyed in this environment because there are no protective elements in the backside, and it's IP-65 front-rated. IP-54 in the back and they're putting this in the harshest environment, humanly possible. I'm happy that my name's not on that. So framing every TV, trim kit, cladding, mounting, and protecting the LED is equally as important as the technology that you're going to use. But people don't think about those things. I want to get the project. I want the box. That's not smart business  I wonder if the market is now at a point where it's like buying a high-end vehicle in that the salesperson can go on and on about what's under the hood and the typical buyer just doesn't care and in the same way, they don't care really whether it's COB or what controller is used or any of that stuff.  They just want to know how good is it going to look, does it suits my needs and what's the budget.  Chanan Averbuch: So I think you're definitely getting more to the commoditized point of the marketplace, which is where I think you're going to see several players disappear. It's already starting to happen. Hence the reason why I've always focused more on what it's supposed to create and what it's supposed to feel like, how much you're supposed to be immersed, which is why it's content first, software second, LED third in our world, and then trim kit, cladding, framing to follow for that same reason. It really comes down to how do you not just differentiate yourself, but how do you actually demonstrate that difference. Having the right content obviously helps, having the right software helps, having the right LED helps, but one of the things that we're going to be investing heavily in on a national level to start within the US with Miami, then New York, then Chicago, Austin, then LA is physical experience centers throughout the US and that will be going global as well in the near future.  What I'd like to do is when a client from a sports team a luxury retailer or a real estate developer, whatever it may be, wants to see the product, Yes, I could do a Zoom. I can do a Microsoft team, whatever it may be, but I will, on my dime, fly you into one of my experience centers on my dime and I am a hundred percent confident that the tech stack between the content, the software, and the lead will be noticeably different when you come to the experience centers, noticeably, it'll be a finished product, a true turnkey, a real solution.  Now, the devil's advocate side of that, if I'm a buyer, this is a highly controlled environment where you're able to think about everything ahead of my visit and optimize the whole nine yards versus operating in the real world where power can be shaky. There's public, there's ambient lighting, and everything else that can play into it. How do you counterbalance people like me who walk in and say, yeah, but…  Chanan Averbuch: Great example, I just spent $20,000 to do a massive outdoor demo for one of our clients, and we did the demo at one o'clock in the afternoon at the harshest moment, exactly where the sun was hitting strongest. And you explained that?  Chanan Averbuch: Oh yeah, and he intentionally chose the spot, that was the harshest spot, where it's direct sunlight. I'm like, gentlemen, how do you think this looks? And they told me how it looked and they were pleased, obviously, I said, this is the worst it's ever going to look. He goes, what? He didn't understand what I meant. I'm like, you chose the most sun exposure, like the worst. If you think this looks good, it only gets better from here, and I explained to them why, and they're like, got it. But I spent $20,000 on that demo to do it the right way. So I agree with your thesis and what you're saying about that in a controlled environment, but with that said, in our experience centers in our showrooms, we have a complete AV system, multiple sources, multiple HDR sources, and multiple cable TV boxes. I could show four cable TV boxes. So if a Sports Park comes in here, like Dave and Busters, I could demonstrate that. If it's a home theater, I could show it with surround sound, Dolby quality, as well as HDR with the collide escape. I could show. Exactly in an indoor environment. Yes, but outdoors? Absolutely. There are environments where you have to put it outdoors and do the real stress test. No question.  So if you're going to market as an LED manufacturer and your marketing focus is on: here are all of our technical specs for all of our different pixel pitches and this and that, and basically blind the person at the other end, the buyer with all of this flurry of buzzwords and jargon, does that work anymore? It strikes me that the LED market is now somewhat commoditized.  Chanan Averbuch: So frankly, you're a hundred percent correct. I'm not focused on the tech specs of the LED whatever.  Does the customer care about it?  Chanan Averbuch: I think there are some exceptions in the market. There's an artist that I'm working with who really understands the technical spectrum. They understand color parameters. They understand DCI like some of them understand this stuff, but that's like the 1%. But the 1%loves us because we're able to produce, and deliver those exact results.  But to your point, the conversations we're having are very different in the sense that for example, we just closed a deal with a major sports team. They originally wanted a 3:3 LCD. I said to them, I'll work with you on pricing to get you to the LED world. Because I know for a fact, the LCD is the wrong approach for your application. You're going to be doing spreadsheets, and you have a bezel in between, and now bear in mind, that Blue Square, the parent company, has a ton of LCD business that we do with Samsung, right? On Blue Square X, we want to make sure that if the requirement is there to do an LED, then it should be there, and the reason why we're able to successfully take a 3:3 or 4:4 and turn it into a lead project is that we're asking the right questions. We're educating, not just the marketing person, not just the facilities director, not just the branding team, but everyone along the way is saying: Where's your seat? Where's the closest viewer? What's your content strategy? We're not asking about the LED. We're talking about what the actual application is. Because you're right, in a commoditized environment, what's the difference between the first 30 Google searches they come up with an LED? It's hard to differentiate. But those other 30 companies are not asking those questions. They don't want to. They just want to move boxes.  Yeah, they just want to know how much wall space there is. Chanan Averbuch: That's it. But they're not asking about content playback. They're not asking if have you partnered with Novari, or do you have experience with with Samsung's MagicInfo. They're not asking the right questions because that requires education and training, that requires industry experience.  Now with Blue Square X, do you have preferred manufacturing partners or are you getting your own led custom manufactured by white label or how does that end of it work?  Chanan Averbuch: Great question. So we are day one, day two, and day a hundred, and from here on out, focus on the premium side. So nothing that's off the shelf in the market is of interest to us. Nothing that exists today on the LED production line is of interest whatsoever.  We are designing specs for the higher end of the spectrum. That's where we want to be. So our LED partners are not people I've worked with in my previous role or others, it's, I would say, the higher-end side of specs and therefore we are designing to our needs from day one. So it's definitely custom spec to something that's not available to the mass market.  So does that mean you're doing the technical design over in the United States and then getting it a contract manufactured by a high-end production line, probably in China or Taiwan? Chanan Averbuch: And Mexico as well. Yeah.  Oh really, in Mexico?  Chanan Averbuch: For TAE purposes. It is a market for governments as well.  Interesting, and on the Mexico side, is it final assembly or are they manufacturing the LED?  Chanan Averbuch: So there is some manufacturing done here, and assembly. So there are certain components, obviously, that don't make financial sense to do complete production here. It really depends on what the next president of the United States looks like because I think that'll determine some of the taxation side of things and how tariffs come into play. So we're just ultimately preparing for the doomsday scenario and the ideal scenario simultaneously. How do you deal with the cost end of it? It sounds like you're going after premium clients, is cost not as big an issue if you can, as you said much earlier on, really go after the ROI model and what the real benefits are?  Chanan Averbuch: While I definitely believe in my heart of hearts, price is only an issue in the absence of value, at the end of the day, the clients that we're talking to understand that there's a way to hit something that should be a $100 and pay $60, and there's a way that if you get the $60 solution, it's not going to look or perform like a $100 product either. We communicate the values of both extremes. Like we'll go and say to the customer, if you want to get this $100 solution, I don't feel comfortable giving you the $60 solution. But if you only have the $60 solutions, this is what it looks like, and what we'll try to do is we'll offer the financing option as an OPEX model so that they don't have to get to that, I don't want to say it, but the crappier option, the lesser quality. We'll gladly take the OPEX model and work with them so that way it fits within their budget because I wouldn't want a lesser experience for myself. Why would I want that for my clients?  Is that an increasing demand these days? Can you help with the financing on this?  Chanan Averbuch: So, I think it's coming up more. Is it actually translating to the numbers or percentages that I thought? No, they're not, but it's evolving and growing in the markets. I'll give you an example. If someone is in the car wash industry, okay, and they're used to doing static signage, and now they're trying digital to jump from zero digital CapEx expense to spending half a million dollars. It's hard to get approvals for, but now if you break that down to $5,000 a month or $8,000 a month over three years, whatever it may be, all of a sudden it looks a lot more palatable.  So I think it depends where the organization, where the institution, and where the non-profit is in their experience with digital and how their internal approval process works. Now there's a harsh environment, car washes.  Chanan Averbuch: Oh, it's so much fun. So much fun. We went to the car wash show in Nashville and I'll tell you the most amazing thing that I discovered. There's people like you alluded to that get it and they realize it, and there's people that don't. The ones that get it realize I can't buy crap, right? I can't buy inferior quality. The ones that don't get it, get burnt usually. So I wish them only the best.  Tell me about the company. Where is it based?  Chanan Averbuch: Blue Square X is based in South Florida. Home of no state income tax here in Miami, and the market is actually a bit on fire here on a regional level where others say the real estate markets are slowing down, Central Florida, Northern Florida, and South Florida has not slowed down just even a bit. Velocity here is amazing. This is our home base for us but we're about to finalize a few other locations here in the US as we speak.  What's the size of the company, both, Parent and, just the X side? Chanan Averbuch: Under 20 employees currently at this moment, but we're hiring and growing rapidly.  For Blue Square X?  Chanan Averbuch: Yep. And for Blue Square itself?  Chanan Averbuch: So it's hard to say right now because some of the resources are shared at the moment. But that's obviously been a change from the install professional services and the creative side, again, we're very focused on the creative side more so than anything else.  But one of the partners also is very strong in the rental and staging business and has a whole plethora of warehousing and service support models throughout the US so we have that extra tier of support from one of the partners. All right, and where can they find the company online?  Chanan Averbuch: Great question. If someone wants to reach out to me directly, you could definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. As for the latest to the company, it's bluesqx.com and you'll be seeing some of the press releases coming up about it I really look forward to engaging with customers. I know people get scared a little bit when we talk about premium, they assume it's price. It's all about the experience, and if you work your way backward through the experience, then everything else that seemingly doesn't matter matters now.  And the clientele you're going after would tend to understand that more than maybe a certain car wash operator. Chanan Averbuch: Oh yeah. But as you alluded to, the ROI is there if you're trying to evoke an emotion or an experience, that's what we care about. We want people to walk away from a retail experience, from a school, from a broadcast studio, from a control room, from a real estate and say, holy cow, how did you see that? It has to be Instagrammable. It has to be something that creates that wow moment. We want to create those wow moments.  All right. Thank you for having the time or taking the time to chat with me.  Chanan Averbuch: Absolutely. God bless, and thanks again for your time as well.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Feeding the content beast is an endless challenge for most companies who have invested in digital signage technology for their venues, particularly when the messaging mission is not data and pricing, but material that informs, educates and generally occupies the time of viewers. There are a few companies out there with suites of free streaming content channels, curated and sorted by interest areas. But free means ad-supported. So the action channel a bar owner might have up on screens has digital OOH ads, just like linear TV. A start-up called Stream is coming at this from a different angle, producing custom content that looks like cable TV news channels and is sorted by interest areas, like channels for medical and dental offices. The big differences are no ads and low-cost monthly subscription fees. The service puts people on screens, but AI is also used to what Stream calls augment the videos. Started just a year ago and just coming out of side hustle/stealth mode, the founders are going after what they say is a gap in the market for this type and style of content. But in meeting with prospective customers, they've also uncovered hidden demand for private label TV channels for larger clients. I chatted recently with co-founder Anthony Nerantzis. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Anthony, thank you for joining me. I knew nothing about your company, Stream, until the other day I got an email, I looked at it and I thought, this is interesting, who are these guys? And I asked a couple of questions and concluded that perhaps we should have a chat. Can you give me a rundown of what you do? Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me on your program. A big fan. My name is Anthony Nerantzis, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Stream. Stream is in a unique space and we think of a new space in the digital signage industry.  What we're doing is producing really premium, but low-cost and customized content solutions for CMSs, network operators, and so on to put what is a premium content product and deliver premium content product to their end users. Our whole content model is based around on unique streaming channels. So we have both plug and play, but also these white-label custom channels that we produce for brands and organizations that want to get their messages out in a contextual way to drive engagement with their customers and their viewers and we're really excited about it.  So if I'm looking at one of your content channels, what does it look like?  Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah. So what we did is the founders of Stream come from media and comms backgrounds. So what we're the best at is telling stories, visual storytelling, narrative storytelling, audience engagement, and what we identified is that a broadcast news look and feel with a host, with that graphic representation of messages, people are drawn to that. People want to engage with that sort of content. It's a premium, high-level content, think ESPN or CNN. So all of our content is based around that broadcast news style, look and feel.  What we do is for different, contextual environments, different venues, we create content that's relevant to those venues. Think of a broadcast news channel for a doctor's office. Think of a broadcast news channel for the C-Store. It's really contextually relevant content for those different environments, and it's delivered in that nice look and feel of a news broadcast.  So it's audio-driven? Anthony Nerantzis: We do offer audio solutions, but what we've found for the digital out-of-home environment, typically, there is no audio, and that's for a few reasons. First, our file sizes, just as far as the handshake and the transfer, with our partners, a smaller file size, easier to transfer, easier to upload. But second of all, a lot of the end users that we've worked with, especially on the white-label channel side, don't want noise pollution in their environments. They're just looking for that visual component. So that's where our focus is.  We obviously do audio, but our bread and butter is, that visual aspect, brilliant visuals, that draw people in. So if it looks like broadcast news, is there a reporter or a host or whatever you want to call it, on-air talent, talking, but you subtitle it or is it more visuals with supporting, titles or captions?  Anthony Nerantzis: It's a great combo of both. So we do have our lineup of Stream hosts that we utilize for our production and our development and then they do appear on the screens, and yes, with a subtitle delivery of those messages, but we have graphics of messages, headlines, subheads. You wouldn't turn our broadcast stations on your TV after a long day and sit down on the couch, but if you were to do that, it does appear as if it were a CNN, ESPN, or Fox News sort of broadcast look and feel.  That sounds expensive. I mean with on-air talent and everything else and the news resources that you need for that, having some experience in that in my old newspaper days and everything else, and there's a little bit of rxperience with broadcasting. On-air talent and everything else costs real money. How do you get around that? Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely. So, as I said, we come from the media and the comms space. So we do have that production value, that know-how of the space. What we've done is we've integrated some neat, really revolutionary, AI augmentation, to our displays and the content. So not only does that accelerate. our production process but it also helps us keep our costs, you know in check And allows us to provide what is really low-cost content to our end customers.  Obviously right now we're priced to scale. it's not cheap but we're excited, you know comparatively to a lot of the other options content out there. We're able to come in comparably, if not in a lot of cases lower, but still delivering a premium product.  Are these AI avatars, are they generated hosts as opposed to real on-air talent?  Anthony Nerantzis: So not generated. So we call it augmented because they are our host, they're on payroll and we work with them for a number of different creative, creative situations and use cases. But yeah, so one of the ways that we're really able to within our tech stack drive our costs down is  through the rendering process. Again, augmenting our hosts rather than it's not what we're doing is not fake or avatar generated in that capacity, but we are using our, real life host talent and then using them as AI generated through and to deliver them across our streaming channels.  It sounds like there's two ways to go at this, the standard sorts of channels that you already have, and there are custom channels. If it's a standard channel that's going into a doctor's office, what am I subscribing to? What roughly am I going to pay? I'm sure there's and it depends on there, but, also just what's the refresh cycle? Is this something that's refreshed daily, weekly, monthly?  Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. So I think a doctor's office is a really great example of where we show up in a way that current content options aren't quite there. What we're doing, I would say on the plug and play side, we have several channels. We have Med One, which is a catch all healthcare sort of channel of healthcare infotainment, and then we also have a dentistry channel, and then we also have a dermatology channel and we're looking at other avenues for other use cases within the medical field. But what these are doing is they're showing really interesting infotainment content that's relevant to those spaces. We like to say contextually relevant. They're sharing news from around the industry, news from across the health landscape across the US. It's all G-rated. We use the four year old test. If you're a mom in a waiting room, what would you be comfortable with your four year old seeing? So it's not gory. It's just health tips and interesting stuff. That's going on studies hey a new study came out that lifting weights after 60 is good for bone density, things like that, and then our custom channels, if you are a bigger network and you own a network of, several hundred screens across, dentists office, we can really get really custom on that white label space with corporate branding, corporate messaging, and really for those brands, taking the exact messages that they want to deliver to their customers in that really unique five to ten minute waiting room experience, and getting them off their phones and having them focus on the screens, with relevant content. As far as pricing goes, that's where we're really excited and probably most proud. So for our venue channels, that's our kind of our second tier. Those really environment specific channels such as healthcare, those can MSRP run anywhere from $10 at the high-end and $5 at the low end. So compared to what it would cost for a CNN Health with through a cable subscription, it's really nice, it's obviously a fraction of that. But it's also a step above rotating PowerPoint slides, with messages that say, “Go get your flu shot”, which after the third or fourth flip, people are tuning out.  From a cost perspective, it's extremely competitive. And then the white label channels, that's also really exciting for us because we're able to deliver those brand specific channels at a really affordable cost.  I suspect that's definitely a “it depends” thing on how much they want and everything else. But if you had a typical, private label channel, would that be like a hundred bucks a month a thousand bucks a month? Anthony Nerantzis: That's a great question So it depends on the end point and you got me with “it depends.” It does depend but for now, i'll give you an example. We have a network with a hundred end points and that they ask for a white label channel and you know with regular updates, it's not daily updates, but with regular updates, we're able to deliver that at 50 bucks an end point so considering the value that you're getting, the brand itself is getting their very own broadcast news channel.  When our CMS partners put us in front of these folks, and they say, hey, this is something new, this is something exciting and you can have your own broadcast news channel. The end users are thrilled. Going from rotating powerpoint slides to something like this is such a value add as far as customer engagement. We've really found an enthusiasm for that sort of new age content.  Are there personalization options out of those private label ones? In other words, can the dental office in Cincinnati versus the one in Cleveland inject their own kind of messaging like, “Please welcome our new hygienist, Sarah” or whatever? Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely, and it's actually funny you say that because the network that I just mentioned previously, they have a network of doctor's offices across the state of North Carolina, and each one of those offices has their own little, news, notes, updates, awards that they want to highlight that maybe might not be appropriate to share across. Someone in Winston, Salem might not care about what's going on in Carova, so we can make it really specific based on the location, obviously at scale, but yeah, we can get really granular as far as how tailored we can make it to each specific location. This is different from the streaming channels that companies that I see out there like Atmosphere and Loop and that. Those exist for the purposes of having content supported by advertising. You're not doing advertising at all, are you?  Anthony Nerantzis: That's a really great point, and no, you're right. We are not doing advertising. We are all about content forward, grabbing that audience's attention and giving them the content rather than diluting it with ads. I think that we're different, from that fast TV space in a few ways, very low cost subscription model, not ads. We're not necessarily a walled garden. We work with CMSs and we work with operators and distributors as a puzzle piece to what they're doing and really being allies to them so they can go in to their partners and their end users and say, we have this really cool puzzle pieces that we can fit within our system. So we're trying to be allies in that way. We don't have a player we're not a walled garden and then I would just say third of all we are at the end of the day, we're producing that premium content. We're not licensing it from other folks so we can control that messaging.  We can control what's showing up on the screens, make sure it's G-rated, make sure what these brands want in their locations and environments and venues is really tailored to them, not a lowest common denominator loop-based sort of system.  So you've got a content team that's paying attention to the news wires and just the general run of news out there as well as press releases and everything else, industry reports and so on to pull together your stuff? Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely, and that's really our strength. Our team, the founders specifically, we come from some of the biggest media and comms companies in the world. So we understand that space. That's where we think our biggest value is, yes, tracking the news, but also identifying these brands and organizations. What are the best messages to connect with your core audiences? How do we drive this forward? Especially infotainment, but also in a retail media space where it's about conversions, driving action. That's our specialty and that's where we've been really able to flex our value with our current client book. You mentioned, you work with CMS companies as opposed to them. How does your stuff plug in? Anthony Nerantzis: CMSs are our best friends. If there's a North star for us, it's really being partners with the CMS is because they're so powerful in the sense that they have the distribution, they have these relationships and they know what their customers want. So when we talk about integration, we are coming to them in two ways. First, a simple integration of our plug and play apps within their app store. So when a customer has their interface template up, they can plop us in, and then our content is really seamless. The handshake is very seamless between us, and then our content can show up on their screens. Is it streamed straight from your servers or the host that you use for streaming or are the CMS getting a file and it's stored locally on the player?  Anthony Nerantzis: That's a great question. How it typically works is that HTML5 is our best friend. We provide the content feeds through that, they plug into the CMSs, and then the CMS from there distributes that URL through their app store. So when someone selects us out of their app store, it plugs in basically they're given access to the license through the URL. We can get as simple as we've had clients come to us. End users specifically if we're working right with the end user and they're like, we just want an mp4 file, so we'll just drop an mp4 file in there in their Dropbox and they plug it into their CMS template and they're off and running. We pride ourselves on universal connectivity. We'll meet you where the customer is  So if you have an end user who says I don't want a CMS. I don't want that additional monthly cost or whatever. Can I work just directly with you? Can they do that?  Anthony Nerantzis: As I said, our most important ally in the space are these CMSs. So we respect that relationship. So if we're working with a CMS and there would never be a situation where the client would be like, see you later, CMS, we're just going to plug in the stream. We value our long term relationships more than any sort of, short term gain of an individual network. And then beyond that, and this came up the other day, we're working with the CMS and their client has a few dozen screens and there might be a few hundred other screens on the horizon in the next few months. We make very clear, we were brought onto the project by the CMS. We're not going to expand past the boundaries of where their players are plugged in. We respect those relationships and I think that's really the key to our success.  Yeah, and I think the end user community, if you want to call it that, is also more knowledgeable than they were for a good long time, where they understand that having a proper content management system with device management, monitoring, all those other things, the ability to scale and all that are really important versus just, finding some server player that can call a URL. Anthony Nerantzis: A hundred percent and I think that's what we're recognizing, and we really can only go as far as our CMS partners, media players. We're not going to give individual URL feeds to a thousand screens. We rely on them for that distribution.  Maybe my mind blanked or something, but did you talk about the typical frequency of content changes?  Anthony Nerantzis: That's a great question. So for our flagships, our news and sports, obviously that's quick hitting news and that needs to be updated throughout the day, which it is.  For our venue channels, those are mostly environments, for example, a doctor's office, you might really only be in a doctor's office once every six months, and you'd think that we'd say, we just need to update those channels every six months. What we really go for is, perception is everything. So if that venue owner isn't seeing it updated that often, they're going to think they're not connecting those dots. We're there to connect those dots for them. We're there to consistently fresh content. So when they're walking into their place of business, they're not like, wow, this is the same thing that was playing two weeks ago. So for our venue channels, we do updates at least two or three times a week to keep that content fresh, relevant.  Our biggest fear is stale content. That's what we want to get rid of. That's what we want to move past and we want to show up well for our CMS partners that their end users are happy with the content that's being displayed. Obviously with white label, it really depends on what the client wants, but again for us it's all about going above and beyond and being proactive in that sense to provide fresh content so that's kind of part of our bread and butter.  When you were developing the business plan for this, were you thinking white label was a big part of the business or is that something that you landed on as you started talking to customers or potential customers? Anthony Nerantzis: White label was not part of the plan at all whatsoever. That was born out of really, I would say a listening ot users. So pre launch, we were meeting with a lot of folks, and they were thrilled about and saying, hey, these plug and play options are great, compared to our rotating PowerPoint slides. Let's get this going.  But what we noticed was there was incredible demand, really desperation for tailored content. Obviously now everything's going to be tailored, customizable, and contextual. Not only in the infotainment space, but in the retail media space. So we're ideating, Hey, what if we make these custom channels? What if we can go to a brand and say, Hey, whether you're just trying to entertain your customers, let's entertain them with news and updates about the company? And then if you're trying to sell a customer on something, why don't we drive action through content and messages, that will achieve those goals. What we did was, we obviously went through a pretty big development phase on what we did is we put these samples in these productions in front of folks and the reaction that we got was incredible, and it really showed us that this tailored content and this white label content is really where things are moving away from the lowest common denominator and really going towards contextually relevant brand centric content. I assume that was a pretty happy discovery because you're able to, in rough terms, 10x the monthly subscription fee from an endpoint.  Anthony Nerantzis: We were very fortunate to be in a position where we were already tracking towards it. So yes, it was a “whoa” sort of moment, which was cool. I don't think we could have imagined the reaction that we've received from it, and transparently, we really used InfoComm as our major kind of launch point to get our name out there, and we were expecting to show up, shake hands, get to know people, meet people.  We brought, obviously, a little tablet. We were showing people what we were doing, and the reaction, specifically for these white labels… We were on our flight home, from Vegas, with huge smiles on our faces, I don't think we could have imagined how much these white labels, channel offerings, how much interest that would have generated. So you were at Infocomm and I walked right by, apparently.  Anthony Nerantzis: I guess so. I'll have to catch you at the next one. I think it's in Orlando next year, right? Yeah. It's starting to ring a bell now that when I walk around, I take photos of stands thinking, I don't know anything about them, I don't have time to stop right now, but I'll look this up later.  If I go through my photos, I bet you there's one in there like that and my apologies for not stopping, but, I get swarmed that week.  Anthony Nerantzis: I'm going to let you off the hook. We did not have a booth. We were just walking around. Maybe a booth next year. Maybe you can take a picture of a booth next year. But we were just on the ground getting to know folks, trying to make the most of it.  And you're able to do that just by having chats with people?  Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah, we're really fortunate. Obviously, the founders are from outside the digital signage space and someone who's been a huge mentor to us is Bob Ratcliffe. I don't know if you're familiar, but he runs, really, what we found to be an incredibly consultancy and, he's really been our mentor and also guided us around the show floor, and introduced us to who we needed to know. So we're fortunate for Bob and he's obviously a great partner with us.  Yeah, subject matter, knowledge and contacts and all that are invaluable. So how long ago did this start? Anthony Nerantzis: As I said, we usde Infocomm to put our name out there. Transparently though, I would say since June of 2023 is when the idea was first born.  Oh, so this is like real new?  Anthony Nerantzis: Yes. I think I mentioned earlier, but we thought we had an idea, we thought we had something, but what we did was we did a lot of listening. We met with partners even before we really put our name out there publicly. I can't tell you how many Zoom meetings, in person conversations that we had with people in the space, CMS operators. What are you looking for from a content perspective? What are you missing? What's your current situation? The production and development process, obviously, of our software stack, took a long time, to optimize it and get it up and running to what we wanted it to be, to show up in a way that we were proud of. So I'd say, yeah, about a year and a little before our one year anniversary, we came out to the world and timed up perfectly with Infocomm.  So what's the state of the company at the moment? Is it like a full time company or is it a side hustle for you guys?  Anthony Nerantzis: So we are just breaking out of our side hustle, which is amazing. The last month and a half have been an absolute whirlwind. We are in a full growth stage right now. We're incredibly proud of that. So We're going full on and we're fortunate that we were able to get so much excitement right from the jump that we're able to make this decision. So we're definitely in the growth phase. I think the next three, six, twelve months are going to be extremely exciting. We have a lot of really cool stuff coming down the pipeline, not only with product development, but with partnerships. So we're excited about where we're at. Actually, just last week, we were accepted into NVIDIA's Inception program for early stage startups. So that gives us a whole suite of tools that are going to propel us, even further forward with our capabilities. So we're really excited about that.  Yeah, that's how I got wind of this and I, admittedly, didn't know a darn thing about NVIDIA's inception program. What does that do for you? Is it funding or is it just support or connections? Anthony Nerantzis: I think a lot about the last one. So it really integrates us directly within their partner network of VCs of developer support. So I would say just from apartner in a network standpoint, that's going to be the biggest value add. The second really huge boon for us is going to be access to some advanced features within their software suite. Obviously we're always looking for ways to level up and optimize our production processes. And with Nvidia, with their help, and being part of this network, we're going to have access to a lot of the really cool things that they're doing behind the scenes. So we're really excited about that and hopefully over the next month or two here, we're going to be able to roll out some things that are a direct result of that, being within that network, so a huge opportunity for us for sure.  So that gives you access to a whole bunch of computing power, particularly on the graphics side, which I'm sure it is intriguing. Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely. That's the name of the game right now. We need it and just to have a partner like that is pretty awesome. If people want to know more about your company, where do they find you?  Anthony Nerantzis: So we're a few places. I think our channel of choice is for sure LinkedIn. go ahead and follow us on LinkedIn. We're Stream, and then our website is streammedia.news. So we kicked .com to the side because we want to really show that we're news, we're content forward. We're not streammedia.ads. We're focused on that content with the news. With the news portion. So I encourage everyone to check us out.  I suspect streammedia.com was also gone many years ago. Anthony Nerantzis: Dave, you're exposing me.  As was the stream.com, probably gone in 2003 or something.  Anthony Nerantzis: I would imagine, yes.  Or 1993, I don't know. Alright, Anthony, that was great. Thank you. Happy to learn more about your company and best wishes with all this, and I guess I'll see you in Orlando next year. Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely, Can't wait. Thank you so much. We really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you to all your listeners and we really had a lot of fun.  

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Dubai, Qatar and more recently Saudi Arabia have developed a reputation in digital signage for bankrolling projects that seem mainly focused on sizzle and scale. But there's a lot more going on in the region than work that's just about Wow Factor. It's a busy, high opportunity part of the world for companies delivering big visual display projects, but also one that presents a lot of challenges in how things work - everything from regulations and timelines to cultural differences. I've got to know a Dubai-based company called Blue Rhine Industries through its strategy director, Nita Odedra, who I first met at an ISE conference. I'd already been impressed by how the integrator actually produces useful marketing - tight, explanatory videos that do the job of explaining what was done and why. It seems sensible, but is remarkably rare in this sector. I see a LOT of it, so I know. Nita and I had a great chat about the company's roots as a traditional sign company, and how and why it expanded into digital. We spend a lot of time talking about what's happening in the region, what customers want, and how business is done. If your own company is thinking the Gulf region presents a lot of opportunity for expansion, that is indeed true. But like a lot of things, it looks easier that it appears. Local knowledge and experience are invaluable. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know Blue Rhine Industries, can you give me a rundown of what the company does?  Nita Odedra: Yeah. So we're a digital signage system integrator headquartered in Dubai, in the UAE, and we are working across the entire GCC on various projects. That includes additional screens, software, and interactive solutions, across a range of industries. That's us in a nutshell.  What are the roots of the company?  Nita Odedra: So we formed in 2006 by a gentleman called John V. Joseph, who still runs the company now, and he started the company as a static signage fabricator. So very humble beginnings where we were fabricators for static signs and shop signs. So it could be a Starbucks sign or a Cartier sign. Then inside the retail stores, it would be the category signage, light boxes, and menu boards in F&B, and that's how we started the business.  And you went to digital, was it because there was an opportunity or it was one of those things where you looked at it and realized, okay, we have to go this way? Nita Odedra: Yeah, it was the latter. It was that we identified that there was a shift happening, in retail, in F&B. So where we felt this the most was the quick-serve restaurants where they were changing their traditional lightbox menu boards to LCD screens, and that was a big business for us, lightboxes, menu boards, keeping those menu boards updated. So at that point, we realized that there was a shift happening and we were going to start losing the lightbox kind of offering that we had we formed a relationship and exclusivity with Phillips Professional Panels, Professional Displays at the time, and we were their exclusive distributor here in the UAE for a number of years and that's where the digital signage business began.  And what does that represent for Blue Rhine now? Is it like a big part of their business or like a sideline?  Nita Odedra: More than half the business now is digital signage or some type of static signage, which incorporates digital signage into it. So we have fully dedicated teams. It's like the business is almost split into two and digital signage is where we're seeing the most growth.  I suspect the two are complimentary still in that if you come across a job that involves something more than hanging a screen on a wall, there are a lot of solutions providers that don't really have the expertise on the engineering side, don't have the man lifts or any of these things to do the more aggressive or complicated work. Nita Odedra: Absolutely. So that's really our differentiator in the market here is that because the company grew from being a fabricator. So we have four factories. We have facilities for large steel structures, both indoor and outdoor large totems. So we're doing canopies for gas stations as part of our static business, which allows us to be able to do those large unipoles for the out-of-home media agencies, for example, down the highway.  So the ability to manage that whole project from technical drawings on steel structures and, the housing and all that type of stuff, all the way through to fabricating in our facility, installing it in-house, having the digital signage arm of the business, the software, the content, we're able to provide that full end to end solution and that means that when we're doing these installations, especially indoor environments, where we're doing the secondary structure, every millimeter counts when it comes to that perfection of LED screens, for example, and having that beautiful screen housing structure, that's all done by us. Lord knows we've seen around the world, large format display projects that have been done by companies who probably don't know what they are doing because things fall over or fall on people and everything else.  Nita Odedra: Yeah, we've seen that recently, but, we've got in-house engineers. We've got those project managers in-house. We've got guys doing BIM in-house as well.  So we have that technical capability all the way from the drawings. Then we've got the fabrication facility with skilled workers. We have multiple HSC kinds of offices that are going on-site. Most recently we did quite a complex project, from beginning to end, which was the Dubai Mall Aquarium, which was a long installation. That was six months. Because it's a fully operational mall, we had a very short window at night time to go in to put all the access equipment up and work. we had to take out the existing screen, which was an OLED LG display, and then replace that with the infrared screen that we put in and that took six months and we're very proud of that installation because we had zero HSC violations over six months and our team just did a fantastic job there.  Is that an anomaly or is that kind of the work you do?  Nita Odedra: That's very much the kind of work we do. So it is these large screens, it is custom fabrication. It will be complex sites. So we're doing one at the moment, which is a very large outdoor screen on the corner of a building, which is also still in construction. So this is very typical, especially when we're looking at those large format screens.  Those are jobs that don't come along that often, even in your region. A lot of companies would rely more on the, use a term I use quite a bit, meat and potatoes kind of work where it's conventional flat panel LCDs for menu displays. Nita Odedra: So here the market is a little bit different because we've got so many projects, new developments, they're trying to do things differently. We've got cylinder LCDs, we've got pillars being clad, etc. But yeah, you're right there. Our bread and butter and the fast-moving business that keeps the lights on is the retail business. That is the LED screens, the LCD video walls, and interactive displays in retail environments.  When we get those orders in, they turn around pretty quickly, within a couple of months, the payments are pretty good on those because you're delivering in a shorter time frame, and on the larger projects, that's where, sometimes we can get our money stuck, projects get delayed. An example would be Abu Dhabi Airport, Terminal A, where that project was delayed over a couple of years and we had that stock ready, and then COVID came, the project got delayed, and that became from what should have been two years became five years. You just have to sit on that stuff.  Nita Odedra: You're sitting on it or you install it and then the airport's still not open. You've got a screen up there that's not ready for any content yet. But it's just the way it is, especially in this region, projects sometimes do get delayed and we just have to be prepared for that when we're resourcing the company and now we're at over 750 people, almost 800 across the region. So it's managing those resources and making sure that the installation or the fabrication that we're aligned internally on manages everything.  So from a distance, I look at the GCC region and I see these mega projects being announced and I always wonder how many of them are actually going to be built and how long does it take?  Nita Odedra: So these are ambitious projects, right? So we're looking at projects in NEOM, like The Line, we've got several projects in and around Medina, and they are very ambitious when you look at them on paper. They are happening, but some of them are being scaled back. So you may have heard Neom The Line that was scaled back from, hundreds of kilometers down to just a couple of kilometers.  But it's still one of the largest building projects in the world, even at that scale-down size, right? Nita Odedra: Absolutely, and we are seeing that these projects are now coming to life. So things that were announced, what, five years ago, probably like 2018 when they set the 2030 vision for Saudi Arabia specifically. A lot of those projects are now happening, the hotels are opening, the resorts are opening, so we look at places like the Red Sea Development, which has luxury resorts. It's going to be a tourist destination. They're already accepting guests there now. They've got Qadir, which is picking up pace. We've got King Salman Park, which will be the largest urban park in the world. When you're in the city, work is happening and it's happening at a very fast pace. Who is largely funding these? Are you in a better position to see them actually happen if they're coming through a big fund like PIF in Saudi Arabia?  Nita Odedra: Yeah. So a lot of the work that we're doing and the projects, they are being funded by the government, by the public investment funds. So those are the ones that are picking up speed, but of course, other private companies are coming up with their developments and they're turning the round very fast. There are out-of-home media agencies that are doing phenomenally well. They're companies like Al Arabiya who are sweeping up these new developments for their network. Is it very competitive in your region? I'm familiar with three or four companies who do what you guys do, different routes, and everything else. But I suspect because of the money that's going into the region, there's all kinds of other companies in the region and in Europe and even in North America are looking at it and thinking we need to be there. Nita Odedra: There is competition. There are system integrators, smaller ones that we're having to compete with quite aggressively in the retail space, but where we're different is we've been in this game a lot longer. So perhaps we've lost some clients in retail for a year or two, they've experimented with perhaps other system integrators. Some have been successful, some when it comes to those retail projects, a little bit more complex where, the fabrication element comes back in again, experienced project management that comes back in again, HSC, when these elements are not supported by a competitor, they end up coming back to us and we're able to maintain that retail business. But absolutely in retail, we have a lot of competition. But there is a lot of work here. There are lots of malls still opening, whether that's the UAE or in Saudi, where there's a huge number of malls opening up, there is business there.  Does it feel at all like a bubble?  Nita Odedra: It feels like a bubble when I look at politics internationally and how we don't have that here and we're a little bit in a little happy bubble here. So yeah, it does feel like it sometimes. And it's easy to forget that this region is an anomaly. We are a region where there are a lot of ambitious projects with speed happening. There is work. There's a very positive attitude towards these projects that are being developed. There's a very positive attitude towards the hosting of sporting events in the region. People are excited about it. They welcome it. It's something new, right?  So it can feel like a bit of a bubble sometimes when we have so much regional excitement that, perhaps globally, it's not the same landscape.  Yeah, you mentioned shopping malls going up, and I've been to Dubai, it's been a number of years, but I thought even at that time, okay, there's enough shopping malls here now. But they just keep coming.  Nita Odedra: I'm shocked as well. So every time there's a new mall, I was like, surely they're not gonna be busy, and then you go, and they're packed. This is low season right now. So the school holidays started last week and we don't get much tourism in the summer, but the mall was absolutely packed. It's very much a small culture here. We don't have historical high streets or historical villages. Everything is new. Everything's flashy and people want to go to the mall. That's the only place that they can go to for F&B, for entertainment, picking up their groceries, and doing their usual high street shop. There's a practical reason behind that too, just that it's, so crazy hot there that malls are air-conditioned. So the dwell time, I gather, is not measured in minutes and hours.  Nita Odedra: Yeah, it is not unusual to be in the mall for six to seven hours. You'd perhaps do two meals there, watch a movie, go shopping, and then leave after doing your grocery shop. So it's high dwell times.  It's incredibly hot here. So I even have friends who go to the mall In the summer, just to get their step count in. So they'll go, grab a coffee, do their step count, pop in, run some errands, whether it's dry cleaning, or whatever it is that they've got to do, but they'll do that step count inside the mall, as opposed to a park, or the town pavements. Does that make it a better media environment?  Nita Odedra: Absolutely, So for the out-of-home media agencies, they've got a good captive audience there. It's all indoor. So I think it works really well for the media networks and or the out of their media agencies.  We've chatted a few times in the past. I'm always curious about the impact of the wow factor on Projects over there and how important it is  Nita Odedra: culturally, I think we've got a bit of history here with Dubai because it's been established a little bit longer in terms of these, ambitious developments, but they want to be the biggest and the best, whether it's building the tallest building in the world, the Burj Al Arab, the largest mall in the world, maybe the busiest mall, the busiest airport terminals. They do have this pride in trying to put developments out there that are new, and ambitious. Something that is the largest, and what that means is sometimes it comes with a bit of flash and you've got all bells, all whistles installations for screens. Dubai Mall is an example where I think that's the largest indoor screen in Dubai Mall and you'll have other ones coming up in the next couple of years trying to beat that I'm sure. Now, as somebody whose role involves strategy. I suspect it's a bit of a delicate dance for you in that you're hearing about these ambitions of being the biggest, the best, and so on and you have to sit there and think, monetarily, that could be great for us, but strategy-wise, I'm not sure that's the right move. Nita Odedra: Exactly. So we have to be really careful about which projects we take, how many projects we take, and when we take on new partners and new product lines. When we dive first, we're adding more software with, we're providing content now. So we've got to be really careful about what our strengths are and stay true to who we are. We get asked all the time to do things that are, outside of our scope, but we really have to say no, scale it back, and just stick to our objectives, our strategy as a business, the direction we want to go in, and that's very much customer experiences, passenger experiences. So we're one of the verticals that we're, growing at quite a fast pace is transport. So airports. There are a number of domestic airport openings in Saudi, we've got new airports opening in Dubai and, across the region. So that's an area that we strategically know that we can take on large projects, we're capable and we're going to see good business.  Airports, I talk about a lot as being, if you want to see the state-of-the-art and digital signage, look at a refurbished or newly built airport because it just covers the waterfront in terms of digital out-of-home, conventional signage, wayfinding, everything.  Nita Odedra: An airport is a perfect example of where you could probably take somebody for a site visit and show them every single type of installation for a digital screen possible and software and integration. Airports are the perfect vertical for us to really penetrate and all our complete offerings can be in an airport because we're taking our experience within malls for travel retail. We're taking our experience from mixed-use developments, and all our experience from all the other verticals can now be applied within transport and airports specifically. Yeah, I'm curious if you work with the large engineering and architecture companies, like, all the way up to Populous who I think is involved in the Qiddiya project.  Nita Odedra: So we work very often from concept all the way through to delivery, and that would mean the contractors, the architects, the cost consultants, the design consultants, these are all stakeholders that are involved quite early on in the conversations and remain in those conversations almost through to delivery.  What about on the services side? Obviously you're doing the front end, you're, deploying, you're, designing, fabricating everything else. Are you doing ongoing aftercare? And you mentioned content before?  Nita Odedra: Yeah. So services are part of the complete solution, right? So we've got to offer the AMC afterward, and that can be anything from servicing the screens to maintaining them in this region. You've got LEDs outdoors and they need to be maintained, and cleaned of dust. That's very much part of the AMC. There's remote content management where we're providing content management solutions for retailers and that's for outside of the region as well. So retail operators who are not just in the GCC, but all the way through to Malaysia, Europe, travel retailers who are in Norway. So managing their content from Dubai, and then, more recently providing the content creation piece as well. So that's where we will have partners. We've got our preferred content partners who are delivering fantastic work globally, and we're transparent with our clients as well that, this is our partner, but we're offering the complete solution under our canopy.  You're managing screens in Norway from Dubai?  Nita Odedra: Yeah, we're managing the content for screens in Norway, all the way through to Malaysia, and Indonesia, I think even in London, so it's becoming global now. So even though we're delivering work within the Middle East region and our direct offices and fabrication facilities, warehouses are all in the GCC, so those are the Gulf countries, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi, and UAE. We are also in Egypt. We're delivering into North Africa and the wider Middle East area.  Do you have a preferred list or go to a set of partners on the display hardware and software side, or do you take it project by project?  Nita Odedra: Yeah, that's a great question, actually. So as I spoke about earlier we started this journey with Philips Professional Displays that was for a short period of time when we were starting out. We then realized that distribution wasn't for us. We want to be a system integrator. We were shooting ourselves in the foot there. So that was handed over to another business within our group of companies. So our owner has a trading division. So that was handed over to them and they are now the distributor. And we fully threw ourselves into being a system integrator where we were able to develop relationships with a number of different vendors and partners, and we remain agnostic. So it's dependent on the project. What is right for that project? And yes, there'll be periods of time where sometimes we're getting great pricing from Samsung and we'll deliver a number of Samsung LCD screens, and then LG. The next day that changes and that's very much price driven if I'm honest Based on the availability of the screens then when it comes to the LED screens, that's far more complex and that is a problem based on the project and the requirements, and that can be very different from project to project. We have a fantastic Head of Digital, Neeraj Vyas, who's been with us since the beginning, been with us for over 11 years now, and he is in China almost every month going and doing that quality control, really getting into the details of the screen, and he's the one very often who will spec out which, the hardware we're going to use for those big projects. Do you find that the customers or the specifiers, if they're an engineering firm or an architecture firm, do they know what they need and what they want to use? Or are they saying, yeah, we want to use COB here, or it needs to be this pitch or whatever, or are they relying on you?  Nita Odedra: Yeah. So that does happen. They are informed and there are lots of great resources available for them to have a vague idea of what they want. But just yesterday I was on a call with our head of tech and a design firm where they loosely knew what they wanted and what they needed. But when we were drilling down into the requirements and the structure of these screens where they're going, and is it facing daylight? Is it not? We then realized that there was a support that they needed and some guidance on the specification of the screen.  So there was one specific screen that they mentioned, and we said, actually we have used that screen in an outdoor environment. We probably wouldn't recommend it for X, Y, or Z reasons. They understood the reasons. Because we're also the fabricator and we've got all this experience in indoor outdoor environments in this regio, we know the ventilation we know how to design those structures with ventilation, what type of provisions have to be made so we're able to get in quite early with these guys and educate them guide them on considerations that they may not have made  The heat in your region obviously tough on humans, and I know that any display technology company has to worry about getting that heat out of the enclosure or whatever, but do you really have to think about it there? Nita Odedra: Yes. We really do have to think about it. There are the manufacturers there who are saying, of course, that it will withstand heat to 50-60 degrees, even beyond some of them, but having done this for over 12 years.  But having installation throughout, the peak summer period for testing. We do have to make provisions for ventilation, for AC, for cooling. These are all provisions that we do have to make for outdoor screens, especially the LCD screens, mainly the outdoor LCD screens here, but for LED screens, of course, we still have to account for ventilation. Yeah. With them, you have to worry about blowing off all the dust and everything, and the sand that gets in.  Nita Odedra: Exactly. maintaining those, making sure that the sand, making sure the structure as well isn't capturing all that kind of dust floating around. So yeah, even simple things like, when you've got touch screens inside malls and stuff and the IR frame back in the days, there's dust captures in there or sensors. These are all things that we have to consider quite early.  I first got an idea of your company on LinkedIn by seeing a video that I believe was for the Dubai Mall, the project you were talking about before and what struck me is, Oh my God, there's an integrator who actually gets marketing.  Nita Odedra: Funnily, the John who I spoke about earlier, my boss, his background is marketing. So I think his degree was in marketing. So he's very passionate about our marketing. He's very hands-on and I'm getting WhatsApp messages in the night saying, let's try this. Let's do something different, and he's the gentleman probably on the video that you saw, and we're a bunch of passionate people. We've all been in the company for a while. He's been there since the beginning. over 17 years, I've been there for almost eight, or nine years now. So we were passionate about the business. We've grown with the business. We've seen the business grow and we're so excited about these projects that we're delivering. We're excited about what's happening in the region, not just for us, but we love to talk about other things that are happening in the region as well. So yeah, I think, we're doing the marketing justice and he's great on camera as well.  Yeah, I mentioned that just because I so often see reports about projects and I'm lucky if they even provide decent photos. So to come across videos that explain this is what we did, this is what we use, this is where it is, this is how it works without overwhelming you with Euro disco music or whatever, just the facts, it was almost stunning. Oh my God, somebody got it.  Nita Odedra: Yeah. So he really came up with a decision very early on, probably about six years ago, seven years ago, actually, that everything needs to be video content. He wasn't even happy with just images. He was like people are digesting content in videos and this was like the days, early days of, videos being on Instagram or LinkedIn. So we started churning out a lot more videos, to begin with, which were just the videos of the projects, and then that evolved to us giving kind of explainers, educating the audience and just making them short and snappy. We're making more data-driven decisions on the type of marketing we're doing, where are we getting the most engagement? What are people enjoying? What are they engaging with and sharing? And it seems to be that the ones where we're explaining in a very short space of time, like you said, within 30 seconds, get straight to the point. “This is a pixel pitch, 1.2, the size of it. What have we delivered? How did we do it?” And just get straight to it. That's what people want to know. They want to see the screen. They want to know how you did it and what did you do? Keep it simple.  Yeah, we were collectively on a panel a couple of months ago now in Munich at the Digital Signage Summit, and it was about doing business in your region and what I asked the group was how easy or hard it is because it is different, right?  You can't just drop your company into this region and expect to start getting the business rolling in.  Nita Odedra: Yeah, we've got 17 years of experience, but still monthly, there are new regulations. There are new challenges, whether that's employing locals. So in Saudi, we've got Saudinization where a set quota has to be local employees. Resourcing regionally as well can be a challenge, just licensing and all that paperwork for us still is a challenge. So I know how daunting it is for system integrators, and vendors trying to enter into this region and there are certain cultural sensitivities that we've got to keep in mind, there are a lot of different cultures working together as well.  So the culture here is very different from European culture and American culture, even more so. There's that consideration to have as well when you're entering into the market. But I would say to anybody that wants to enter into this market, partner up with somebody, to begin with, find the opportunities, find some local partners, get started, have your hand held a bit before you make any decisions, and jump straight into the deep end.  Now, for a company that's from Europe or from North America or elsewhere, looking at going into that region and saying, okay, I agree, let's partner. They're probably going to be intimidated that this partner may result in us losing the larger business because now we have a partner instead of doing this solo.  Nita Odedra: Yeah, I do personally believe that there's enough in the piece of the pie for everybody, especially in this region. But, we look at long-term partnerships. So we're quite selective with who we work with and how we work with them, and we do believe in honest, transparent partnerships. We will make sure that we've got contracts in place to protect them more than we even. So if they have, because we are looking long term, if they've brought a client, they've got a client who is from the US or Europe and they're looking to support them here regionally and they need a partner. We'll ring fence that client. We'll put contracts in place, it's a ring fence for them. It's only them. We won't touch them directly and just make sure everything's covered legally for them and honor that as well, so making sure that even from the top down, you've got that commitment. So we always make sure on all of our partnerships that from right at the top of management, I'm getting them in conversations with those partners and getting that commitment on what we will be delivering on, and also not creating any exclusivity either too early. Sometimes getting exclusive with a partner straight away and it's not good for them. It's not good for us, to allow them the flexibility to go out to other system integrators. They don't have to work exclusively with us.  And just finally, on the cultural side, I would say the common perception is it's very different over there and challenging to work in and everything else, but in talking with you and speaking with other people who work in the region, they've said, yeah, it's different, but it's perhaps not what you think. It's not as challenging and things have relaxed, particularly in areas like Saudi quite a bit.  Nita Odedra: I've seen a shift here. So I've been in the Middle East now for almost 10 years, and I'm originally from the UK. I'm just outside of London. I worked in London and across Europe and America in terms of my territories. So I'm familiar with the European market, familiar with the North American market, and the way of working.  There is a different culture and pace here, but the projects are happening at such a speed that things do materialize. They do happen quite quickly. So it's not that much of a culture shock. You've just got to be prepared, the professionalism, should we say, is different. It's there, but it's just different. All right. Leave me hanging on that one.  Nita Odedra: Timelines, deadlines, all that kind of stuff. Those get pushed back a lot in this region, adhering to timelines. So most of our projects that get delayed, get delayed by the client side, approvals for drawings, client.  One of the biggest challenges we have is site conditions. They'll push for us to have, I don't know, let's just say 300 outdoor interactive kiosks ready. They'll pay a premium just to have them turned around faster because they're not willing to wait nine months. They want them delivered in four months, and then there's no data or power, and we're sitting on 300-plus outdoor kiosks and charging them for the storage, and that is not uncommon.  Interesting. Great to catch up with you. We see each other here and there at trade shows, but we're obviously many hours apart. So it's not a routine thing.  Nita Odedra: Thank you for taking the time out, it's been a great conversation and I look forward to seeing you hopefully at ISE. Absolutely.  Nita Odedra: Thank you.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Motion graphics designers tend to enjoy the creative side of their jobs, but there can be aspects of their work, like editing and rendering slight variations of the same spot, that are best described as soul-sucking. Neb Savicic has lived that as a motion graphics designer, and with a couple of friends in Serbia, concluded there had to be a better way. So they put their heads together and, after testing interest, started Plainly - which automates video creation and produces finished spots at scale. Like 1,000s of videos in a matter of minutes. This is not a library of pre-made templates that end-users can then tweak. It's a SaaS tool used mainly by creatives in agencies and studios to take what's developed in a professional toolset - Adobe's AfterEffects - and plug it into Plainly's cloud platform. The net result is that a creative team that is charged with producing, let's say, 500 videos for a QSR chain can do that with one template and a spreadsheet file that has all the differences itemized per location. What might take weeks to accurately produce, instead takes one click and a few minutes to get rendered, ready-to-use videos. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Neb, thank you for joining me. It's nice to chat with you. We met in Munich a couple of months ago. I didn't know a lot about Plainly. I wrote a piece when you did some sort of a partnership with SignageLive, but for those who don't know who you are, can you tell me about the company, what it does, and how and why it was started? Neb Savicic: First of all, thank you so much for having me. So Plainly is a product that helps creative teams automate and scale up video output while keeping the quality of their videos high. What that means, in a nutshell, is we have a platform that allows users to automatically render variations of their After Effects videos just by providing data that's going to be in those variations. So the benefit of automation is you can produce videos at scale. You can produce a lot of videos quickly without all the monkey work to do each of them, right?  Neb Savicic: Yes, so the key benefit, and that's the problem we're solving, is that in many use cases, creatives have to spend their time changing text, changing images, and creating variations of the same templatized video they created a month ago for different markets, screens, and products. My background is actually in video. I was a motion designer before planning, and I always hated those kinds of projects, and that's where the inception story came from, and, I was like, there has to be some better way. So we created a platform where you can create one template, and one After Effects project, and then our platform will automatically create all of the different variations you need. At the same time, you can focus on different, more creative, and more important tasks. So I understand that for a lot of social media things, even for things like utility company bills, if they want to do a video summary, customer by customer, how would this be used in the context of digital signage or digital out of home?  Neb Savicic: When I first came into this industry, and I was looking at the content that the companies were putting out, and I said this on another podcast, the one thing that always bugged me is that these companies invest so much money into their systems into their digital signage systems and the content doesn't look that good. You invest so much money to have this great system running in the background, and the thing that's actually displayed and the thing that your customers see is the thing that's getting the least amount of effort.  So using a tool like ours, you can actually make sure that you have relevant content, personalized content, and updated content all the time on all of the screens. So you can imagine… This is the easiest example, but like a QSR where they have the same content on every screen in every restaurant across all the locations, and that's just because they have a limitation of human resources, they just don't have enough employees to create different content. So they're satisfied with the same stuff.  With a tool like Plainly and the power we give you, you can actually create individualized content for each screen. So, let's say it's raining in London. You can make different content when it's raining compared to Manchester, where it's sunny, and you're going to sell different stuff, it's that ability to automatically create different individualized relevant personalized content on a large scale that's what we give to the digital sign, to our users from the digital signage industry.  Do you have companies that are actively using this? I know I mentioned that a partnership was announced with SignageLive. SignageLive is always good about working with emerging companies doing interesting things, so it's not surprising they're one of the first to do that. But how are these company's customers using it?  Neb Savicic: We work with many agencies, some of the biggest agencies, especially in the advertising and creative industries. These agencies are using it for digital signage for their clients and the way they're using it is exactly how I described it.  They were spending so much time creating different variations of the same content and they realized they needed to offload this to machines and open up some of that time for our creative team to actually do something more, they paid these people a lot of money because they're great and spend time moving the pixels around, their users, agencies, and in-house creative teams all use Plainly in the same fashion, where you can just drop in a big CSV, a big Google sheet with all of the different video variations and in a click of a button you can get a hundred or a thousand different video variations.  To be clear, this is not a template system like a lot of digital signage CMS companies have. I think they are sometimes called composer systems where you just open it up and you use templates that exist there, and you can adjust what's on them.  This is developing templates within Adobe After Effects, usually, templates designed by motion graphics designers who know their way around AE. Then, that's where you plug in, right? Neb Savicic: Yes, exactly. One of our key selling points is that we are a native After Effects solution. So our users have to be After Effects users. That's why I'm saying they're in-house creative teams and agencies. So what this means is that we are not offering you boilerplate templates that are the same for everybody. You can actually create your own custom-branded bespoke templates that look awesome and then use our platform to increase the output of those templatized videos.  So, what would the workflow be for? Let's use that example you had about QSR chains and wanting to have different menus based on weather conditions, geography, and that sort of thing. How does that work in the real world?  Neb Savicic: Okay, so there are two ways you can achieve this. First of all, you can do what's called a batch renderer, which is very nicely demonstrated in a video we did for the SignageLive integration. Basically, what you do is upload your After Effects template into Plainly. You say, okay, we want to change the product's price, the product's name, and the product's image with every video. You create a big Google Sheet that's gonna have all of the different variations. You drop in that Google Sheet or a CSV into Plainly, click Render, and Plainly renders all of the different variations. That's the simple, no-code-needed way.  The second way, which is a bit more advanced, is using our API. With our API, you can actually create any kind of workflow, and this is where we can also talk about programmatic. You can programmatically create video variations on demand. So let's say you have a system that detects it's rainy in New York, let's create a new content piece, that just pings our API and says create a new video, and we send you back the video so there are a couple of ways you can achieve the workflow, depending on the technical abilities. What's the timing and everything of that? If you hit “Batch render” or whatever the button is, you click it, does that take 10 seconds, 10 hours, or 10 days?  Neb Savicic: You can see this on our YouTube channel. We actually made a video in which we rendered 1000 videos in 17 minutes so it's quite a fast system. Obviously, it depends on how complex the video template is, but it's quite fast, and it's quite capable of producing like we have customers doing tens of thousands of videos, like fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, so the core of our product is the scalable infrastructure that can output any number of videos. Are you using big, cloud-based compute systems, like AWS or whatever to do that, or is this your own iron?  Neb Savicic: No, of course, we use Google for the rendering.  So that gives you all the scalability you need.  Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course. It's scalable on demand, and we don't have to worry about them shutting down. No, they're not anytime soon, at least. So what is the output file?  Neb Savicic: It's a video, first of all, that's the big thing for digital signage.  It's not an HTML5, it's a video.  Neb Savicic: No. It's an actual video, MP4 or MOV. So that also has some benefits in terms of being able to play it on older screens and any kind of screen so that also has some benefits.  So any media player, unless it's a complete piece of junk, supports playing out the video, whereas it might not play out HTML5.  Neb Savicic: That's one of the benefits, yeah.  Are there settings? If I say, “I want 720p, 1080p, 4K,” and “Here's the format: it's portrait or it's landscape,” can you munch on those things?  Neb Savicic: Of course. So all of those things are actually handled in After Effects. So the customer decides what's the duration going to be, what's the dimension of the video going to be, what's the design, but then also some of the agencies we work with, they actually do stuff for broadcast. In those cases, they require very specific output parameters. Because of that, we have a feature where you can define these specific outputs, such as, if you want to change the bitrate, the FPS, or any of those more technical parameters. That's also possible after the video is rendered. If you do, use your example, a thousand videos in 17 minutes. For each of those videos, where do they go, and how do you distinguish which one is which? Can you give them names based on metadata so know this is Spanish, Escondido in California, postal code, and that sort of stuff? Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course. There are a couple of ways you can achieve this. One is naming the files. You can use the data parameters from the video. If you have a product name, and then you want also to add Spanish, you can name them. But in the case of the API usage, you can include the metadata in that API call, which will be how you distinguish those videos. But specifically for digital signage, and this is one of the things we did with SignageLive, so let's say in the spreadsheet you also have a column that says, where is this piece of content going to go? In SignageLive, it's called tags. You can actually use those tags and automatically distribute the videos to the screens with SignageLive because of their integration and the way we did it. But generally speaking, you can achieve that level of automation where you're dropping a CSV or filling out a Google sheet, the videos are read automatically, and they are distributed automatically to all of the screens where they need to be. I assume there are guardrails and checks and balances on this stuff. Automation is awesome, but it can work both ways. If somebody makes a mistake or something goes hairy and the rendered videos are incorrect in some way. How do you make sure that doesn't happen? Neb Savicic: So that's up to the user. We don't alter the data in any way. So what we get is what we put into the video, and then it's up to the user to introduce some checks and balances and security measures to make sure that the content looks right.  So if there's an approval gateway of some kind that you want to look at each piece of video and go, okay, yeah, that looks right. That's up to the customer. That's not something inherent in your system?  Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course, and we do it also for security reasons. Of course, we don't want to be liable for approving something and then making a mistake. So we leave that up to the user and ensure they have the flexibility to do it in the way they want.  I think I saw in one of the demo videos that you do have or offer users the ability, at least at the creative stage, to do a draft render, look at it, and then go in and change some of the things, right? Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course. If you see a video that may be in, the data was incorrect. You can easily re-render that video, or, as you mentioned, use a draft version to make sure that it actually looks good before it's published.  You're starting to work with AI, as everybody says they're working with AI, but how are you using it? Neb Savicic: So we are introducing AI into our tool to help our users do the tasks they always do with the assets outside of Plainly. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you have a product image. Those product images, in a lot of cases, have backgrounds, and in the video, you want to have an image without a background. So we are introducing features that will help you - we call it pre-processing - remove the background or denoise your audio, and do those things that really help make the lives of our users a bit easier. So they don't have to do things outside of Plainly. They can do everything in one place.  It's very much what I hear from people talking about the coding side and using AI to remove or take away a lot of the grunt work.  Neb Savicic: Exactly, and I think that's the right use case for AI. It's just that there are tons of tasks that people just don't want to do, and it's the same as with Plainly like nobody wants to change the text layer or the product name 10 times like you should use machines for that, and I think you should also use AI for those kinds of tasks where. It's so obvious that it's useful in that regard.  So what about the idea of putting in a chat GPT prompt that says, “Make me a video for hamburgers that are $2.99. Sundays only”?  Neb Savicic: That's a good idea, but it's not what we're trying to build, unfortunately. What's really interesting about Plainly, is that given that we are an API-first solution, we are very modular. We have clients that are actually doing a bunch of AI stuff before the assets go into Plainly. For example, we have one customer, at this point, multiple customers who are using AI avatars. So Plainly doesn't really add AI avatars. Still, since we have an API, they can quite easily bring our solutions together and have a solution that's creating an AI avatar. Then that video goes into plain to be included in the final video. If you want a ChatGPT prompt, you can just introduce ChatGPT before Plainly stringing them in a workflow and making any kind of workflow you want.  I have some history with content automation and using After Effects templates, going back 10 years. The struggle I had was where it was a partnership. The big challenge I had was people didn't get it. They didn't understand the idea of templates and automation and making their lives easier.  I'm guessing that it's much easier with this because you're not going to end users. You're not going to resellers or solutions providers. You're talking directly to the agencies by and large.  Neb Savicic: Yeah, it's quite an obvious thing for them because it might seem tricky from the outside because, you could say oh, you are making Motion Designers obsolete. You're taking somebody's job that somebody changed names of the product there all day. But being a motion designer before Plainly, I don't look at it from that angle, I look from the angle of, you can have that Motion Designer to do a lot more work, different work, different creative work and use his or her time a lot more efficiently.  Why do that menial work in that manner that's soul-sucking, when you can create different templates and different projects and that's what the agencies see. They see an opportunity for new revenue. Basically, they can take in more clients because they now have this tool that's going to help them output ten times more content than with the same amount of staff.  Yeah. I was curious about that. I suspect there's a huge problem, it depends on its qualifier, but I'm curious how much time and money this can save. Neb Savicic: Depends... I'm kidding.  I did some calculations, I was looking at some templates that are with our customers, and I was like, realistically, how much does it take to create ten videos from this template? And even if you have a fully templated project, you have all of the data ready to go, it can take anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes per video, depending on how complex it is. If you need to create ten videos, a hundred videos, thousand videos, you can see how that easily adds up where we clean with just literally one click. You add the CSV and can do thousands of these in 17 minutes. So the time savings are massive, but not easily counted. You cannot easily calculate it. At least some of it is owed to, it's the old phrase around garbage in, garbage out. If you don't tag everything properly in the After Effects file, automation is not as easy, right? Neb Savicic: Yes, of course. But it's not like you have to do some special work to prepare a template for Plainly.  You just have to name your layers and things.  Neb Savicic: Of course, every good Motion Designer or Video Editor will name their layers properly because otherwise, they won't find a way around their project if they return to it a month or six months later.  Believe me, I've fallen into that trap. It's very hard. So you just have to be organized. You have to name this name stuff properly, and everything is going to work like with some other solutions on the markets they all say they're After Effects supported, but the reality is that yes, they support After Effects, but it's not natively. First of all, you must alter your creative process a lot, meaning you have to work with a plugin or some special effect to import After Effects into their platform. With Plainly, you're just working with After Effects. You put After Effects into Plainly, and it's going to work. So we don't alter your creative process in any way. We just empower you to create more videos. The other thing is that if you're not an After Effects native, that means that with a lot of solutions, you're actually turning After Effects into some intermediary format, which means that you cannot use all the effects or there is some quality loss that happens in that transition. So that's what our users love about Plainly.  I would imagine this opens up the opportunity for a “boutique level” agency or creative shop to take on very large jobs at a scale that, in the past, they would go, “We would love to have this work, but it would kill us.” If they have this tool now, they can compete with the larger agencies, right?  Neb Savicic: Exactly. Yes, and that's what I meant when I said it opens up new revenue opportunities because you can now take on more work, be a huge company, you can be outputting hundreds and hundreds of videos, even though it's…  coming out of your spare bedroom. Neb Savicic: Yeah, out of the basement.  How does pricing work?  Neb Savicic: Oh, so it's a SaaS, which means you pay either monthly or annually for a subscription and that all depends on the number of minutes you export. It starts as low as $59 per month, but it can go higher if you need more minutes.  So classic pricing tiers are based on the amount of work you do and the amount of output.  Neb Savicic: Which makes sense.  You charge on finished rendered videos, not on the draft, in terms of time?  Neb Savicic: Yeah. We just look at the output, not what you're doing to plan on, just the output.  You started this a couple of years ago, or three, four years ago? Neb Savicic:  2019.  Okay. So five years ago, there were already some companies in the market doing maybe not the same work, but similar kinds of things. I did a podcast a few years back with Dataclay and I'm aware of SundaySky and some other ones out there.  How do you compare to them, and when people say, okay, why would I use you versus brand X, what do you tell them?  Neb Savicic: So there are a couple of things. First, if you compare Plainly to some other solutions, obviously being cloud-based, there is a difference to some of the other tools, like you don't have to worry about your rendering infrastructure because that's us. If something doesn't work, that's our fault. That's the core of our product. We ensure you can render as many videos as you want, as many videos as long as you have money. That's one thing, and then, of course, there are things like being After Effects native, where you can literally add any kind of template. We have had clients with amazing 3D-based templates that wouldn't be possible in other solutions, and then they were API-based. So a lot of our customers are actually building internal tools. They're actually integrating Plainly into their apps or internal tools for creative teams. So those three things are what separates us from the market.  So for the big agencies with internal software developers, who would use the API, this is great. But for the smaller agencies or the purely creative agencies, they can go at it using the no-code side of it and not have to worry about APIs and things. Neb Savicic: Exactly. Yeah, that's it.  Where are you guys at as a company? I saw that you got some seed funding from, what, the Serbian incubator fund or something?  Neb Savicic: That was the first thing. That was in 2020, and then we got accepted into a very prestigious US accelerator called Tiny Seed. We were the first company from the Balkans to get in there. So they obviously saw something in us, but we were growing as a team, growing the customer base. We are so lucky to be working with some of the largest agencies and names that you would recognize from both Europe and the US, and we're just trying to make them happy and create a product that makes their lives better.  I realized you're serving a whole bunch of different vertical markets and use cases, digital signage, just being one of them is, that a substantial noticeable or a friend of mine uses the term consequential part of your business or kind of an interesting sort of side aspect to what you do. Neb Savicic: I'm not sure how big digital signage is with our agency customers. I would imagine that a good portion of the content they do is for digital signage, but as for us working directly with digital signage companies, we're just getting into that industry. With the SignageLive integration, we might announce more integrations soon. That's a new industry for us. We see that there are a lot of benefits for the users in the digital signage industry we're just trying to get into.  We chatted at the digital signage summit in Munich. So, obviously, you were there to network and meet some people, and I had some beers. Would you also be at ISE?  Neb Savicic: Yes, of course, and then Munich next year and possibly Intelcom.  I assume this product will always evolve. Over the next year, are there new wrinkles you'll be rolling out that you can tell me about without alerting your competitors?  Neb Savicic: Honestly, the good thing is that I'm so happy to have a technical team that's really fast, and the product improvement cycle is insane. We are putting out new features on a bi-monthly basis. So I don't know. One year from here, who knows what will be added? Definitely, the AI features are greater than everybody. So all the normal stuff: faster, better, easier.  Neb Savicic: Exactly. The stuff that doesn't change.  Yes. All right, Neb. That was great. Very interesting. Thank you.  Neb Savicic: Yeah. Thank you too, Dave.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I have been aware, forever, of an Australian digital signage software company called Ryarc, but through the years - and maybe a little because of the distances - I've never met or chatted with its founder and CEO Fergal Ó Ceallaigh. It's one of those submarine companies that kind of operates below the waterline and mostly out of sight, but Ryarc has been around for many, many years - and has done well despite its admitted marketing deficiencies, because the software is all about substance rather than sizzle. That has appealed to the IT people who get involved more and more these days in scaled screen projects. I was reminded of Ryarc during InfoComm, when an industry friend mentioned on a panel a technology he'd come across that would and could use broadcasting technology to move around digital signage content, instead of broadband internet or  mobile data networks. That sounded interesting, and I wanted to know more - as it sounded like satellite content distribution, but different. When I found out Ryarc was the company that was doing proof of concept trials in the U.S., I reached out to Fergal - now based in Seattle - and we had this chat. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Fergal, thank you for joining me. I've been aware of your company for a long time, but we've never actually spoken. For those people who don't know what you do, what the company does. Could you give me the elevator pitch?  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Thanks for inviting me on. RYARC was founded as a digital signage application, with the starting point of their need for a digital signage platform that combined enterprise capabilities with knowledge worker-level skills by the operator. So this was in an era when digital signage was moving from what was a highly specialized and fairly rare thing, to something where at least from our perspective, the requirement was going to be that digital signage was just going to be another tool in the armory of an enterprise and, as such, it would require rather than a specialized team to operate at a knowledge worker level.  This goes back 20 years, right?  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, it does. We divert a little bit into kind of my backstory. I worked for Microsoft in the 90s in Dublin and I had a fantastic time there. It was Microsoft where the Nvidia of the day, Windows 95 was coming out. So it was a fantastic place to work, and I couldn't have asked for a better start in my career, but I had an itch to try and start something of my own, and I happened upon digital signage. I could see the way trajectories were going in terms of connectivity. If you combine connectivity, availability, and cost & display, availability, and cost, two lines on a graph are going down and to the right and human labor is going up, and to the right. So those three factors combined to make it apparent to me that digital signage was going to be a thing. If it was going to be a thing, it needed software to go with it. So I quit Microsoft, and I did my Asian Odyssey backpack and thing, and I was actually writing the code for version one. I got so bored sitting on the beach in Thailand that I took to actually writing code. I'm serious. That is dysfunctional.  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: I guess. Yeah, it was extraordinary. I'm not a beach guy, which is, another strange story for someone who ended up in Sydney for as long as he did, but, yeah, so it was with that desire to have a go with that.  Coming out of Microsoft, I felt I had a decent handle on usability and what's needed for a knowledge worker-level software product, by which I mean a product that it became. It seemed obvious to me that digital signage was going to become a bigger thing and as a result, it needed to be a kind of a productivity-type app rather than some highly specialized thing that you'd need a broadcast engineer. I think the early software that was available did come out of broadcast if I'm not mistaken. I think that was Scala's backstory.  So, I managed to get my hands on one of those. I can't remember exactly what year it was, but I was like, oh, okay, I can see how this works, but you're not going to be able to give this to Joe in marketing and ask him to start operating it. So that was the kind of genesis of why I chose that particular route and why I started writing code to get there. But it took a few years, from building the thing in my apartment to actually launching the company.  When did the business start, like when you were out there selling licenses and everything?  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: I think the first license we sold was in 2006 but I had gone full-time about two years before that.  So you're pretty happy to start selling.  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Oh, I was. But it's funny. I was working for a company that was bought by Match.com in Sydney, and that was an interesting place to work at the age I was at the time. But then, I met some folks there who are independently wealthy folks and the particular gentleman I approached is named Neil Gamble, a very well-known Grandi in the Australian business scene, South African guy, lovely man. But, a serious business guy who is running one of the largest software companies in Australia, such as they were back then. But he was chairman of the company I was working for, which was acquired by Match, and I pitched him my idea. I turned up in the boardroom office of this large software company at seven o'clock in the morning in Sydney. So I think it was 2003 or maybe 2004, it doesn't matter, but I pitched him the idea, and he said, “Fergal, that's brilliant, but fuck off and come back when you've got some customers.”  So, I duly fucked off and I think he ruminated on the idea for a while and came back to me a couple of months later. I was still working as a contractor at the time so I was fine. He said, “You know what? I've met some other people who are doing certain things in the retail space, and what you said clicked even more. So I'm going to take a swing on this”, and so he put in just enough money to basically pay for me and some other young guy to take the code from what was something I could, demonstrate to something that we could actually sell and the first customer was Zimmer if you've ever heard of Zimmer Frame?  No.  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: The Zimmer frame is kind of like that. It's a mobility tool for people with generally older people. It's like a walking frame.  Unfortunately, maybe I'll learn about that soon enough, but not yet.  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Not yet. May it be many more years, but we put the website up and boom, that was the first one, and then, out-of-home started to take off in Australia and had a pretty decent clip, compared to other markets, and Neil was very well connected in the Sydney business scene.  He started to open doors into places like I could get meetings now with people, and my experience of that, and again, maybe it's reflected in our website and our kind of general low-key profile, generally, I found it, if I could get in front of a customer and showed them the product, we tended to do well. It was the getting the customers part, which was the trickier part for us, but Neil was instrumental in that, and that's how we started.  Back then it was trickier for everybody.  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, it was. Coming from an engineering background, I found it quite interesting, the whole scene at the time. What you had was advertising guys who were in the billboards business and suddenly there was, foist upon them this need to transform into an IT company, and that created a particular set of issues at the time, I think, where you had companies that whose experience and interaction with IT was about, “fix the printer” and “why is my email not working?” So they weren't tech companies in their DNA, they were marketing companies, and I tend to think of those years as like the cowboy years, by which I mean, there were an awful lot of platforms out there. What I tended to see, although not uniformly, was a thing I noticed is that oftentimes, the decision makers because they didn't have a mature IT section within their company, it wasn't a traditional thing for them. It wasn't integral to their business in the way it is now, you often had people making software decisions who didn't really have the experience and wherewithal to assess software and what that led to properly, and I think this is partly what led to the massive proliferation of solutions out there was that the thing with digital signage is that it's fairly straightforward to get a piece of software that will reliably get a flash file or a JPEG or a video from A to B. And when the software assessments were being done by people who didn't really have experience in enterprise software or edge management or remote device management, stuff like that, it was very easy for the smoke and mirrors guys to do well quickly, because no one was asking the boring questions about the plumbing. So that was something that took some adjustment for me with my background.  I think it's maybe part of what led to the proliferation of often these things. I don't want to denigrate or be down on the industry or anything, but there were a lot of solutions out there that were really something that someone had put together in response to a request from someone and then they came up with a logo, and said, we're a digital signage company, and often these solutions, if you ever got to peek behind, to look under the hood, as they say in North America, you'd be shocked at what was there, and I had several experiences in those early times of being Gesamt or someone with a fantastic sales pitch, which is something that no one would ever accuse us of.  I was thinking these guys don't know what they're doing anyway. Anyway, I think that's calmed down a good bit because you have to be sustainable and, eventually, if your stuff keeps falling over, that's going to, with the best sales pitch in the world, that's not going to last forever.  Yeah. I think there were a lot of companies, for a whole bunch of years, who signed on with a service provider, some sort of software company, and then three years later moved on to another one after they learned what they really needed and learned about things like device management and scalability and all that stuff. But first go around, they were attracted by the pretty pictures and the WYSIWYG UX and all that stuff, and as a consultant, I saw it first hand where I would say this thing is boring and ugly, like a Subaru, sorry, Subaru owners, but they're not the sexiest cars, but they just work, versus a Range Rover that looks sexy as hell, but it's going to be a nightmare.  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, that was it. And I guess it was inevitable. If you looked at the factors feeding into that, you had an industry that was being dragged, kicking, and streaming into the world of it and you had a lot of people who saw an opportunity and needed to go quickly, but I couldn't believe some of the stuff that I saw pass muster, and I was because sometimes I get a peek under the hood and it was literally, The wizard of Oz, they're furiously pulling levers to keep the thing up. But we learned, I think, that the company that was the first major out-of-home company we thought was iCorp.  Australian company.  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: That's right, and they were also based in Sydney, and so we, very quickly, felt their pain when things would go wrong and that was an excellent kind of learning curve for us. But what helped embed in the company was this engineering mantra that we had, which was, if it can be avoided, never have the software operate In a manner where if a truck roll can be avoided, it's not avoided.  There's this focus for us on remote manageability so it's different. I know some people in the early days tried to use browsers for digital signage, but that failed for reasons that we don't need to get into, but when there's a huge difference between an application and this even goes all the way up to major, big sticker stuff like Microsoft, an application which leaks memory or does something like that and, yeah, it's annoying when you have to kill the browser and restart it, after a few hours, which used to be the case a while ago, but that kind of level of tolerance for unattended execution, you could see it didn't exist.  It's different if the program falls over and you ring Mark in IT, and he says, yeah, just reboot the machine. But if you've got three-quarters of a million-dollar screen in an airport, that's a really expensive proposition and the failure is immediately public and embarrassing. That helps embed for us that learning experience we had with out-of-home, of the importance of just reliability at the edge and going on from reliability to manageability. So we spent a lot of time finding bugs in Microsoft Core DLLs, that's just through the usage scenarios we had, they just weren't common enough even for Microsoft to have identified some of these issues with things that will leak a little bit every time they're used. It's a software term. If the software isn't carefully crafted every time it runs through a certain given set of routines, it can capture a bit of memory and then fail to release it, which isn't a problem if you're closing your laptop at the end of the day but if you're wanting to run 24/7 in twenty feet up in airside and an airport, it's a different proposition. So anyway, that was all a learning curve, but it helps embed for us this fanatical focus on stability and manageability.  You talked about the people in the meetings in the early days, the visual merchandisers and people from the marketing department, business communicators, those kinds of people, but that's changed, right? The people across the table now, quite often, are IT people.  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, they are, and I think that's just an inevitable consequence of the pain of failure to not do that. It was like Mad Man so the whole focus was on the flashiness of the advertising and the creativity and all that, whether it's on a billboard or TV or whatever. But now they were in a new world where boring stuff like Enterprise IT management was crucial, a factor in their ability to succeed. It was cruel as well because of any failures they had. If you're even running a service and your website goes down, maybe some people would notice, maybe someone won't, but if you've got a big screen downtown, and then your customer is there showing his friends or their customers, say, look, check out our ad down in some public place when it goes wrong, it's really bad because it's so visible, so those two things are combined. So I guess they had to learn quickly and yes, I think it's certainly, it's no longer the situation where you've got someone from Marketing making IT decisions.  So describing your product mix or suite now, what would it be, and is there a particular market that you focus on? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah. I remember before I started the company I read how to write a business plan, and one of the things was identifying your customer, and I thought, wow, there are so many, anybody who wants to display a message somewhere publicly… Anybody with money.  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah. That was the prerequisite. Going back to what I was referring to with the learning curve in the early days, it became apparent to me that there's only so much gilding of the lily you can do in terms of the content management side. I sometimes bristle when we get described as a CMS, because really most of the value of what we do is it's fuller than that. Content management is its raison d'etre, but it needs to do an awful lot of other stuff, and I always believed that for us, that was a strength of ours in our kind of relentless focus on manageability and Edge device management. I saw it just again, through the growing pains of helping an out-of-home company get through the early days of it. That's really where we needed to focus on managing the device and just being absolutely bomb-proof when it came to reliability.  What that has led to, I would say organically is: so are we a digital signage company? We are, but we're other things too. So what this hundred of man years of effort, of the device management side and the remote manageability side of things, we have customers now, who don't use us for digital signage at all. They're using us as a remote management platform for devices, and that has led us, over more recent years, probably since the time I moved from Sydney to the West Coast here into IoT, into Edge AI, into sensor management, and device management.  So I guess what I'm trying to say is what started as an organic reaction to needing remote manageability and not saying to your customer, yeah, you have to fork out an extra 15 bucks a month brand point for some other tool that's going to help you manage the device. That led to that side of the application becoming so developed that it could stand on its own even for folks who didn't need digital signage. So we're on lots and lots of things, where we're not controlling the screen, but rather they're using us as the plumbing, right? For example, for AI and stuff like that. It can identify a Coke can versus a Pepsi can or whatever it might be. But how do you deploy that model to 16,000 different endpoints and how do you collect information at the edge about how you do AB testing? How do you manage the versioning of AI models at the edge? All that kind of stuff. So there's lots of sleep-inducing, boring, but absolutely critical stuff where the product focuses. And yeah, that's on device management, and we're also used to deploying other kiosk-style applications. So the person interacting with the device could be a piece of software running there. It doesn't matter what it is, but it's RYARC that is forming the plumbing that enables all that to work and go together.  Back at Infocomm, a few weeks ago, I hosted a little discussion panel where we talked with three people, both attendees, and executives, about what they saw and everything else, and I asked one of the guys who is actually from an LED company. What he saw that he thought was interesting, I thought he would talk about some other LED product or whatever, but he started going on about this idea that you could use datacasting to distribute content, and he bumped into a company that was doing that, and described it, and I thought, that's interesting but I'm not sure who he's talking about. So I asked him after the fact, who was that company? Eventually came around that it was RYARK. I thought, oh, interesting!!! Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Those guys are still around?  There was that too because I don't bump into your name very often, but can you explain what he was talking about this whole idea of ATSC and using datacasting to move content around?  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, sure. The ATSC thing, so the whole TV industry is they've gotten together and they're pushing the ability of the traditional broadcast channels to be able to carry data. The ability to push data across has been around for quite a while.  Yeah, it happened when when TVs went from analog to digital, right? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Right, but the ATSC 3. 0 upgrade, which was the thing that was being marketed and pushed, just greatly expanded the ability and the bandwidth available to push data across. Again, I think this is likely to be limited in some respects globally because of the ubiquity and cheapness of being able to push data across cellular, right? So in other areas, cellular is the cheapest chip, right? If you go to places like Korea or India or Singapore or countries that have recently developed, they tend to get saturated with cellular very quickly. The situation in the United States is that cellular data is significantly expensive compared to the rest of the world. Canada, it's the same story, right? What pertains in North America is a situation where it is so expensive that alternatives are becoming more attractive. Anyway, that's not really a signal to what ATSC three is all about, but essentially, working with some of the hardware and software providers in the broadcast industry. We've been able to plug into the broadcasting software and hardware side of things such that in addition to using our software, you can use our cloud service or install our software on your own infrastructure if you want to do that. But in this case, in addition to publishing it to the cloud, which is what happens when you create campaigns and do that kind of thing, we can also add another pipe to the mix, and that pipe is the broadcasting station. So when someone clicks the publish button, it's seamless from the user's perspective. But if it's set up in such a way, in addition to pushing stuff to the cloud and having it dribble down over cellular that way, we can also have these files broadcast. So that's a kind of one-to-many, very effective way of getting data across that doesn't require large bandwidth bills. We've worked with some companies with large numbers of devices. It was another example of us learning by doing, where their cellular data bills were a huge factor. So, we worked pretty intensely to make the handshake and everything else in our software super parsimonious. I think with 20 megs a month, I think what the chatter that our software has in maintaining connectivity with the server. So we worked relentlessly and got that down.  But anyway, that's all to show how much of a factor the data cost is, and that's that was the impetus that led to wanting to see if we can offer customers a much cheaper way of getting data across and it works seamlessly. We had a working example at that show at Infocomm. I wasn't there, but I think it was an EV station or something like that, which would allow them to do all the heavy lifting so that they've got video and stuff like that. You can push that over the air. So what's at the far end of it? Is there a receiver or special hardware?  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, TV tuner.  It's like a cable box.  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: What we've been working on over the past year is ensuring that our software can run on these tuners. So you've got the prospect now of not having to buy an ARM or an X86 chip and put it in a computer running Windows in the back at the back of the TV, but we can squeeze our stuff now onto many of these tuner devices. So you have a small but capable box, that started life as a tuner, but we can have our software running on there. That's a big step in terms of cost-per-unit reduction.  For customers, the main difficulty, I think, with the ATSC 3.0 thing is that it's very easy to go to a Verizon or whomever and be able to estimate what your data cost is going to be. If I need to push across three gigs a month to 11,000 devices. I can work out how much that's gonna cost me. The data cost element in the broadcast space isn't quite as commoditized yet. So there's still some ambiguity there and, perhaps, lack of clarity, and I think the cellular companies are awake to this too. It has the potential to eat into or take up a lot of the enterprise pushing off large amounts of data, and there are many industries that can use that, but digital signage is certainly one of them. This is reminiscent of the late 2000s or mid-to-late 2000s with satellite and multicasting through satellite.  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Oh, yes, I remember that.  Is this the same idea, or is this different?  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: The similarity I suppose would be in its one-way communications and you need a back channel to be able to do the other stuff. So you still do with this?  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: You can deploy with just broadcast, so we could get the software running so that there's zero coming back. The obvious thing with that is that you don't know if a meteor struck the sign, right? But it is similar to satellites in that it's one-way. One of the things that we do actually—I don't know if we know—is we do a lot of in-store music. So we use the CMS side of our product suite to organize what is essentially a radio station template and the thing about audio is you can get away with having six ads running for a week on a sign, right? But if you play three Alton John and five others in a retail environment, the staff in the shop, they'll climb ladders to rip the speakers out of the roof because it'll drive them crazy and that's understandable. So ironically, MP3s are fairly small, but you need thousands and thousands of them. So we often found, for the in-store audio deployments we were doing, we had to work with that. We did Woolworths in Australia, which was the largest retailer, I'm not sure if they are anymore, but they're one of the big two there, and we did all their in-store music for years and that was all via satellite, which was really painful actually. But this seems to be working. It's a lot easier and it's a lot better as you would expect, it's nearly 20 years down the line from that.  So is it the same feed, so to speak, the same set of files that you're sending to everybody, or can it be addressable by location, setting different things? Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, we've done some work on that. I can't get too deep into the way our product works because most people won't be familiar with it, but essentially, in our software, we've got this concept called a channel and a channel is an abstract entity that represents an endpoint somewhere or multiple endpoints. We have an engine that will categorize those things.  Let's say you want a national rollout. Now like a lot of other things in the United States, the broadcast market is really quite fragmented. It's not like the UK or Europe, where you've got a single national broadcast or a few commercials and you can go live everywhere. You've got a real kind of mix right across the country.  So obviously you don't want to be pushing, essentially what I'm getting into here is that we know where the data needs to get up. So there's a layer in the software that will go, okay, you need to go to station X, you need to go to station Y and I guess broadcast, but once it just gets pushed out, right? And it's the same kind of files, and again, from the user's perspective, when they're using our software, if it's being set up and configured in the back, in the backend to utilize ATSC 3.0 broadcasts that all happen seamlessly under the hood. So they're just clicking a publish button, and in the case of where they use an ATSC 3.0, instead of it just going to the cloud, it's also going to the broadcast station where we work with the some of the ATSC 3.0 technology companies, goes into their queue and then gets broadcast out and then it goes down to the tuner and then we're sitting on the tuner too, so we can watch the files come in and do whatever assembly and decryption that we need to do, at the edge and playback. So is this something that could be done or are you supporting active networks that are now using this?  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: They are all at the POC stage. I alluded earlier to it being early days as well from the people wanting to utilize this, I think the industry is still working out how to package this and sell it. If they're successful at that and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be, it'll be great for North American enterprise because there's finally a competitor out there to cellular. I don't know what the word is, a triopoly? But yeah, the situation, that a reason why data is so expensive in North America. We could talk for a very long time. We'll probably have to do this again at some point, but that was super interesting and great to finally meet you.  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, I'm happy to talk, and I'm happy to do it again if you think there's more interesting stuff we can chat about. I am probably at risk there doing a lot of reminiscing, but, I feel entitled to that now. I've been in the industry for a while.  Exactly. All right. Thank you. 

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT One of the things I noticed bombing around the two exhibit halls at InfoComm in June was how most of the digital signage software companies were located in one hall, and some of them not looking all that busy, while there were at least a couple of others in the other hall, and they were packed with people. One of those companies was Appspace, and it was clear to me why the company was there with a very prominent stand. They were with their people, so to speak. While Appspace may have started years ago as another digital signage CMS software option, it now refers to itself as a unified workplace experience platform. That's why it was nested in with a bunch of other tech companies that provide the kinds of technologies - like collaboration tools - that drive contemporary workplaces. The company started out small, but now has 450 staff, offices all over the planet, and about 40% of the Fortune 500 as customers. I had a chat with Chief Innovation Officer Thomas Philippart de Foy back in 2022, and I wanted to do a catch-up with him because I was intrigued by what the company is up to. I also wanted to know more about how Appspace products have steadily been stitched into the fabric of how a lot of companies communicate, and tied in with many or most of the core tools now used around modern workplaces. I also wanted to better understand the company's recent announcement of developing native support for its software within Microsoft's Teams. Lots of CMS software companies have tie-ins these days  with video conferencing tools, but Thomas explains in our chat how this is different. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Thomas, nice to chat again. We've done a podcast in the past, but for people who maybe don't know much about Appspace and didn't listen to the last one, the fools, could you give me a rundown of what Appspace is all about?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Hi Dave. Thanks for having me on this podcast again. Appspace has changed a lot over the last 15 or 20 years. It was a digital signage vendor company many years ago. We are now considering ourselves as more of a unified workplace experience platform, delivering a lot of services to large enterprise customers, whether it's digital signage, which is one of the communication channels that we have, or an app, an intranet, or a whole workplace management suite of products. So the company has changed. We have around 450 people globally with offices around the world and really focused on the enterprise market, although we do a lot in the education space as well. Around 200 of the Fortune 500 companies use Appspace today.  Where is the company based? Is it in Dallas?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Well, originally, the company was based in Dallas. Today, a lot of the leadership team is based in Tampa, Florida. So, I would say there is probably a split of headquarters between Dallas and Tampa. Both offices are very important for us in the US.  In the early days, you can correct me, but I think a lot of the development was done in Malaysia, right? Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yes. We still have a very large product engineering organization in Malaysia. Our Chief Product Officer and co-founder, Stan Stephens is still based over there. So that hasn't changed, but obviously, we acquired a company in the US, The Marlin company, a few years back. So we have additional resources elsewhere in the US and then we acquired Beezy, which is an Intranet company out of Barcelona in Spain. So we now have a big dev team out of Barcelona and some dev people out of Porto in Portugal as well. I was at Infocomm recently and found my way over to the Central Hall. Most of the digital signage stuff was in the West Hall, but, if you could take a bus over to the Central Hall because of all the construction, I walked through there and saw the Appspace booth and saw it was very large and very, very busy. And you guys were just in the midst of an announcement. So I thought, well, okay, this would be a good time to kind of catch up on the company and what it's up to that announcement was around Teams integration, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I thought you were already integrated with Teams and it sounds like a lot of companies have done that, but what you're doing was distinct.  Could you explain to me and the listeners what's different about the integration you've done with Teams and with the other platforms?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Sure. I remember having that conversation with you years back about digital signage on devices in meeting rooms and the benefits it would have for large organizations. Obviously, the pandemic increased the value of content on screens in meeting rooms, whether it's for safety purposes or education on how to use the technology in the room. We've natively integrated with several platforms, first with Cisco, integrating directly into their Control Hub platform. This allows you to enable signage from their backend. We also integrated Poly with Logitech. Today, we're especially excited because we're natively integrated into Microsoft Teams Rooms, the leading video conferencing platform in the industry, and being integrated directly into Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) makes it extremely easy for large organizations to scale signage services to all those devices from MTR directly.  This means that when you enter a room, you're greeted with content on the screen. That content could be a welcome message, instructions on how to use the meeting space, or how to keep it clean after your meeting.  It could be corporate messaging, but it can also include Microsoft Teams Rooms instructions, helping users navigate the technology in the room.  We're very excited about the reception we received at Infocomm from customers. I was actually locked into a little meeting room under NDA; it was focused solely on Microsoft, and customers could come in to discover not only what we're doing with MTR but also our integration with Microsoft Teams through our embedded app and our SharePoint integration, essentially everything we're doing with Microsoft. And what's the difference between when other software companies say they're integrated with Teams and when you say there's a native integration? What's the difference there?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: The first and the most important one is that we're the only vendor that's certified with Microsoft Teams Rooms. So if you have an issue with your MTR endpoint and you're running a noncertified digital signage solution on it, Microsoft is likely to say, “Hey, you're not using the product as it was designed. Therefore, it's not supported.” Because many large companies are using MTR, you would expect those companies to want to standardize on something certified by Microsoft. So certainly there is that aspect.  The other one is how you deploy it. A lot of companies have so-called digital signage levering a web URL. We're running our app on an MTR endpoint, and it's deployed through MTR. So from a deployment standpoint, from a monitoring,  it is a true digital signage endpoint, like any of the other apps-based digital signage endpoint. That gives you many additional capabilities around the narrowcasting of content, broadcasting in case of emergency, and so forth. So I think those two are really critical.  There are other benefits to managing Appspace from MTR. But I would say just first, make sure you're using a Microsoft Certified solution so that you're fully supported and then the second is being able to deploy this at scale and have an MTR endpoint behave as a true digital signage endpoint and not just a web URL inside Microsoft, which is what some companies do with Zoom. That is not true digital signage as you know.  So because it's just a web URL, it's just showing a web page like any other web page versus what you're saying is because it's natively integrated, it's a true endpoint and you, you have the ability to know what's going on with it and manage it as well?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. You're able to monitor exactly what content is displaying. You're able to cache content and not stream everything. I mean, it's our full Appspace app that's running on the device. Okay. So with that, is it a kind of a push situation where your customer-facing salespeople and your business partners are saying to companies: You have this collaboration display in a bunch of your rooms, and it's sitting dark a lot of the time, you could do things with it?  Or are the end-user customers saying, “Hey, we have this collaboration display that's sitting dark a lot of the time, can we do something with it?” Thomas Philippart de Foy: I think it's a combination of the requests. What we're seeing is there's a lot of digital real estate deployed in companies that is not used all the time, whether because there's no video conferencing happening or there's no call, no meeting happening in the meeting space, but those meeting space are still visible from outside, either because there's a window that opens up to the meeting space or because it's one of those new types of Huddle meeting spaces, which are open.  So there's a request from internal comms and facilities to use as much digital real estate as possible they have to communicate to employees around the workplace and comms and safety. and there's less and less appetite for companies to print. So they're looking for every digital real estate they can leverage. So I think there's certainly that, and we're getting asked constantly by big companies saying, “Hey, we're rolling out AppSpace. We want to target the meeting group.” That's very, very important to us.  But we're also starting to see the teams that are using the technology for their day-to-day operations saying, "Hey, can I actually put my content on those screens as well? It's my meeting room in my neighborhood, where I have my team. I want to be able to use that screen when someone enters the room to talk about our team's performance and really narrowcast to their team.” So that's why they want full control of the device and not just a web URL streaming generic. Now, do they have to go into the Appspace application to produce that content or to load it in, or is it somewhat headless in that they can produce something in whatever toolset they use and it's, and because of the hooks that are set up, it'll show up there?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah. Both are possible. One of our most popular integrations is with SharePoint. If the comms team is producing content on SharePoint, we have a connector that allows us to fetch that content and repurpose it for digital signs so that it automatically populates.  I mean, that's been a very old story, right? We heard about the need for repurposing existing content from third-party tools. SharePoint is super popular in the Microsoft ecosystem. but it's not only that. But so you could imagine having a playlist of content playing on an MTR endpoint that's just fetching. Microsoft Content from SharePoint that is potentially related to a team or related even to the IT team that operates the MTR endpoint. So now, what you're seeing on the digital sign is the how-to instructions that were actually created in SharePoint.  There seems to be a real distinction between companies that have decided to make their workplace their core vertical market and, let's say, other digital signage companies, whether they offer software solutions that include workplaces as one of their capabilities.  Looking through the Appspace website, it strikes me that this is all you do, and you realized or have learned through the years that you can't just offer a digital signage solution. You've got to be making a space reservation, booking, assignment, and all kinds of other things like that. So what is the range of services?  And, also, is that what you found that guys have said, look, if we're going to work with you, this has to be just more than something that's going to put messages on screens? Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, I mean, if I go back, I think we were one of the very first digital signage companies to say our focus is going to be the workplace and not retail and transportation and others and we were very early there. So we focused on building our product to address the needs of the corporate market and corporate communications.  When we acquired Marlin, we were acquiring a company that was focused on frontline workers, and communication on digital signs. So again, staying very much in our focus area of workplace communication versus retail or other channels. When the pandemic hit, we had a lot of customers who reached out to us and said, our workers are now back home, we need to continue to deliver the message that they were used to seeing on digital signs, but we need to deliver it on their personal devices. That's really when we focused and started focusing on personal devices, released our employee app, and did an intranet acquisition and suddenly, all of this started to make sense for customers. One single platform to deliver across multiple communication channels, but all natively integrated, not something where you're trying to put solutions together.  So we do email publishing, publish to Microsoft Teams, WebEx, and Slack, publish on digital signs, publish into an employee app, publish on an intranet, and all of those are native features of the app-based platform. They're not point products that we're plugging one into the other. That means that from a core comm standpoint or facilities when you're creating content, you know you have the ability to amplify your message to all those communication channels and that all of that is going to be automated.  Now, while we were doing this and focusing on the comms aspect, there was a real need for a new weight for users to plan their journey into the office. You were no longer going and sitting at a desk and just booking a meeting room through Outlook. You needed to book a building pass to access the building. You need to reserve a hot desk or a hotel desk to be able to book other resources like a smart lock or a parking place, all those resources that are needed for you to have a productive user journey. And so we delivered the features In the apps that we had, so it was easy to do it on the signage front for scheduling panels because it's the same app that runs on the digital sign that actually runs on the scheduling panel. The same thing for the wayfinding kiosks, the interactive kiosks that we were doing years ago now also support wayfinding services, and then because we launched a mobile app for employee communication, all we had to do was enable those workplace services in that same employee app, so employees have only one app, one app to receive the latest company news, to be connected to the workplace, but also to manage their journey into the office.  Today, it's a whole suite. That's why we call ourselves a unified workplace experience platform. We have one app that team members use on their personal devices, phones, desktops, and tablets. Then, we have one app that runs in the physical workplace, on digital signs, on an MTR endpoint, on a scheduling panel, on a wayfinding kiosk, and on a desk bar. And then, at the core, you have Appspace.  How do companies get their employees to use that?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's probably the biggest challenge for any organization in launching a new app is user adoption for different reasons. You may have frontline workers who don't have a company email. So we had to support one-time password and digital signage plays a key role there in getting users to activate their one-time password.  Use digital signage, say there's a new app available for you. Scan the QR code. It asks you to enter your employee's unique identifier, your personal email address or phone number. You get a one-time password, and you're then able to log into the app and have access. So that's number one. You need to make sure that everyone is a first citizen of the modern workplace—your front-line worker, or desk worker, whether you have an email address or not. The second thing is a lot of people use their personal devices and if you're like me, I'm not in favor of using my personal device to use a company-needed app. So I want options. One of the options is to have a fully responsive web app, a PWA. So, if you access Appspace on your Safari or Chrome browser, it behaves exactly like a native app. The first time you log in, you can actually pin it on your home screen. Next time you go in, there is no address bar, you have the full app experience, but it's a web app. You didn't download it from an app store. Makes it easier.  And then finally, For IT, the biggest challenge is certifying an iOS or an Android app on mobile devices. That takes a lot of time, sometimes 6 months, 12 months, even, to get the certification. So what we did is we embedded our app in Microsoft Teams, and because it is now the number one app used on desktops and mobile devices in the corporate space, you just, as an IT organization, need to enable the Appspace app in the admin console of Microsoft Teams, and one morning the user wakes up and they have on the sidebar next to do a call, your meetings, you now have the Appspace app and all the capabilities embedded in Microsoft Teams.  That from a user adoption point is game-changing, because now you don't need to certify an app, you don't need your users to download a new app, you don't need your users to remember a web URL, the app is just there living in Microsoft Teams. So you don't have people going, okay, what is this weird thing?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct.  I'm curious, you mentioned the pandemic and COVID and there was endless writing about how this is going to change workplaces, everything's different. Will people ever go back to the office and so on?  I work from home and haven't worked in an office for a very, very long time, so I don't see it, but I'm curious, did it genuinely change, or did it just kind of sort of change? Thomas Philippart de Foy: I think it really changed. I think employees will go back into the office, and most companies want that for cultural reasons, productivity reasons, and so forth, but the way we will go back into the office will never be the same. The physical workplace has changed. There are fewer desks than there were before, more meeting spaces of all sorts, huddle spaces, meeting rooms, conference rooms, a lot more, and so the way a user is going to operate in the physical workplace is never going to be the same as it was before. I think that's huge.  Also, we're still learning, and companies are still learning, changing, and adjusting. And so the core, the heartbeat of the workplace, in our case, Appspace needs to be super flexible to be able to implement new rules and new workflows to enable the user to plan their journey into the office and also to drive the behavior of a user. We have a huge services organization that implemented hot desking and hotelling, and when they opened their office, all the consultants and partners rushed into the office, and they had a huge capacity issue. People didn't book their workspace, so they expected they were going to find one, and there was no workplace available, so they got super frustrated. So, the company implemented managed power outlets at the desk, and power is only enabled if you reserve your desk and check in on arrival. The following day, people who came into the office without reserving a workspace and trying to hijack a desk didn't have power, and that never happened twice. When you run out of power, you always figure out how to reserve your power for the next time you go around. So I think those behaviors are changing, and technology is there to help the behaviors change, supporting the behaviors. And I think that's huge. So it's not telling an employee you have to reserve is telling the employee that if you reserve, you get all those incremental benefits,  Are you also able to support a lot of the devices that I saw in walking around Infocomm, and some of them I was already aware of like very small displays or even just little LED light things that communicate that this space is available, or maybe a display that says the space is available between these times and it's booked these other times or whatever?  I find those things very interesting in terms of office hoteling and so on.  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, the number of new devices released in the last two years has been crazy. Both you and I come from the signage world, and adding a new device and running content on the new devices is native to a digital signage provider. That's what we've always done. So whether you display calendaring data or turn on an LED or not, it's not different from any type of content in general. I think that's where companies who did reservation software are struggling because they don't understand the physical workplace device side of the experience. But coming from the digital signage space in our case, we understand that. So, a scheduling panel back in the day, it was Crestron. Now it's Logitech and iADA and there are so many of those, the Cisco Navigator, and there are so many devices.  And because we're completely OS and hardware-agnostic, you run our app on it, and you deliver the scheduling experience and then the desk plugs are the same, whether you take the Crestron desk plug, the iADA desk plug, or the nPlug, they're all small desk plugs that allow you to run an app on it and display the experience on those devices. So for us, it's very native. What's interesting is what incremental device content we are putting on it and that's the other devices we don't see, all those IoT devices in the ceiling that track air quality, room temperature, humidity level, and occupancy. And being able to display that data back on the scheduling panel or on a wayfinding kiosk or a digital sign in the lobby when you enter the building, knowing where's the traffic, what's the occupancy rate, what's the current air quality. I think that's bringing another level of value. And as we always used to say in the digital signage world, content is king. I assume you do analytics of some kind and how are they used?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: So analytics has always been a big part of administrative users of the Appspace platform to monitor the success of the communication campaign, being able to track which content plays at which time of the day and then when you combine it with tools such as audience measurements, cameras that try eyeball dwell time, then analytics becomes much richer because it's now a communication channel that you can really monitor and track the engagement level, but analytics on the workplace management is as important.  How many users came to the office? What's the average use of a workspace or type of workspace? Whether a meeting room is underutilized or overutilized with regard to the number of attendees? All of that data is extremely important. So we've built a lot of analytics and reporting capabilities in the Appspace Admin platform, so you can actually pull your reports, export all the data and view it live into Tableau or Power BI, correlate it with IoT sensor data, so you can now start to see Not only scheduled based data but also live data. So I know this room was booked for six, but my live data tells me only four people are in the meeting room. I'm, therefore, underutilizing the workspace, or I'm running this communication campaign in the lobby, and I currently have 40 people standing in the lobby. That's useful data that you can have. Now, when you add AI to it, AI starts to give us insights and recommendations. It will tell the facilities team whether or not you're about to run out of a certain type of resource. We're seeing a trend of desks with two monitors in the docking station, and we expect that within the next 30 days, you're going to run out of capacity, which will allow facilities to adjust their workplace and anticipate. And the same thing is true with the workplace. We've just released this week. The ability to create content on the signage and to auto-generate a QR code on the digital sign that will link to the origin of the content, whether it was SharePoint, your Appspace intranet, or the employee app. So when you view the content, you scan the QR code, you're redirected. That analytic is captured and now you have true engagement on whether or not the communication campaign is successful.  Do you find that all these insights, are inherently actionable, but are your end user customers doing things with it? Or are they just kind of seeing and going, “Okay, this is what's going on?”  Thomas Philippart de Foy: No, on the facility side, it's huge because that environment is changing constantly, and they're looking at the best ways to optimize their workplace. So analytics is one of the most important things they want to get out of the Appspace platform.  From comms, now that we've re we really have true multi-communication channels, iit is becoming increasingly important for them to monitor their communication campaign. “Hey, I posted a story in the employee app. It was broadcasted on the digital sign in the Microsoft Teams channel in an email newsletter. I can track where users are getting access to that story. Is it directly from the app through an app notification? Is it because they saw it on the digital sign and scanned the QR code? Is it because they saw it in their email inbox and clicked on it?”  Most importantly, we allow reactions and comments and shares, and that provides additional analytics and so now that also provides additional value in understanding how people are reacting. But what's exciting with AI is that based on how content is trending, you can actually change the playlist on your digital sign to display content that is trending up or trending down to make sure you're getting the right message out to the user and you're promoting the right message and I think everyone is becoming more hungry for more of that. A lot of what I see on the Appspace site and what we've talked about seems oriented to. white collar spaces to offices. Are you doing much in the so-called back of the house, production facilities, warehouses, factories, that sort of thing?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: A lot. I always start all my presentations to customers saying that we treat everyone as a first citizen of the modern workplace, and that's not just marketing. It's true. We want to make sure everyone benefits from the services that the organization's putting in place.  Signage for frontline workers is huge in warehouses. It's massive. When we acquired the Marlin company, it was because their number one focus was people in warehouses and manufacturing plants, making sure they were provided with the right safety information, education, material, and so forth. So I think we will continue to focus there. We're just now expanding the user to go beyond just the digital signage in the warehouse to their phone in their pocket. And if you're an employee or frontline worker in the store, you're not in all the time in the back office, you're often in the front office or in the front of the store, helping your customers to still be able to get that information, those important notifications on your phone are important and I think we do a lot there. Again, unlike most of the signage vendors, we don't focus as much on the screen in the store, talking to the consumers. We're focusing more on the screen in the back office or the screen in the pocket of the user, but we, of course, do digital signage for retail as well. What would happen if a retail chain came to Appspace and said, “Hey, we'd love to work with you guys on digital signage for inside our stores, not for employee comps, but to sell sweaters and shoes and so on.” Would you just say, I'm sorry, we don't do that?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: No, actually, the two largest retailers in Europe use Appspace in the store and in the back office. The project started in the back store and eventually, customers saw, well, why can't I use that in the front store as well? We even integrated, I can't remember the name, with a little company out of the Netherlands who built an integration with Appspace to allow the sale of airtime in the store. We didn't build this natively in Appspace because that's not our focus. But by partnering with companies who have that expertise, we're able to deliver that.  The largest sports brand in the world uses Appspace in all its stores around the world. So we never say no to customers. But what we're very clear about is that we're not building a product just for retail. We're building a product for the workplace and if the features meet your needs, you're more than welcome to use it in the stores. I think we have a lot more than we expected using it.  Interesting. Last question. I get a sense from this discussion and previous chats that if you're a company lurking, looking at workspace as a vertical market, you really need to understand that it's a unique ecosystem and all of the different technology companies that feed into it. You can't just say, “Hey, we can put stuff on your dormant screens and you can talk to your employees through our software.” You really need to stitch yourself in with all of the collaboration companies and all the other technologies that feed into it. Is that a pretty accurate statement? Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, I think so. So I think companies are looking to consolidate, that's one thing. They're looking at replacing point products with a platform that delivers all those use cases through features and not point products for use cases like visitor management, room booking, and all. So one login into one app, whether it's a physical workplace app or an employee app on your phone, you have one app, and you do everything from one place. That's for sure. It also needs to be truly integrated with the physical workplace because companies are looking to build up their ROI with the technology they're investing in. So, since the pandemic, everyone has rolled out more video conferencing rooms than before, but they need to justify ROI. ROI is by use of technology for its main purpose. But on top of that, when it's not in use, you can use it to better communicate and engage your audience and provide a better employee experience. There's incremental ROI to the technology. And so we can't be successful without integrating with all the players that exist in the physical workplace, whether they are access control systems to enter the building, how do I know if I have access into the building? When you scan your badge, your badge queries Appspace and confirms that you have a valid reservation and that you're granted access. It starts there, and it goes throughout the journey.  The menu boards of your restaurants, the menu needs to be on your personal device before you even get in the office. You could potentially book your lunch using the app. But when you arrive at the restaurant, the menu board reflects the same information As they have always been, but now you are aware you have that link between, “Hey, I saw that there was this on the menu and I can now see it on the digital sign.” And you have that continuity in the experience.  All right, Thomas. Thank you very much. I once again, learned stuff, which is what this is all about.  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Oh, thanks a lot for having me. It's exciting. I remember the first time we met. I think we had a table at ISE, and now we have a bigger booth I'm glad it caught your attention, but we're super happy, and I'm looking forward to continuing to talk with you over the next few years. All right. Thanks again, and safe travels.  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Thanks. Take care!

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When an announcement came out about the experiential work being planned for the new Terminal One at New York's JFK Airport, I was familiar with some of the parties involved but not the one guiding it all - a design consultancy called Arup. I clicked over to LinkedIn and was surprised to learn this wasn't some little boutique company, but a multinational firm with more than 10,000 people. Arup describes itself as a collective of designers, consultants and experts working across 140 countries. One of the intriguing aspects of the company is that while it has teams very much focused on the creative process, it also has large teams focused on wildly different aspects of projects, like structural engineering and water conservation. I had a great chat with Gideon D'Arcangelo, a Principal at Arup who is running the JFK project and came over to Arup after many years at the much-respected creative tech firm ESI Design. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Gideon, thank you for joining me. I think the first thing to do is tell me about your company.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Dave, it's great to talk with you. Gideon D'Arcangelo, I joined Arup five years ago. I just reached my five-year anniversary of joining. Arup is a global design and engineering firm, 20,000 people strong, with over 90 offices. So, we work at a global scale. We're really joined up globally, and we do all aspects of design. We are a very multidisciplinary firm. We started out as structural engineers. We are a firm that has major projects with the Sydney Opera House and the Center Pompidou.  Arup is a cooperative. It became a cooperative in the 1970s, and so we have members that work globally, and we pride ourselves on our interdisciplinary design and practice something called Total Design, which is the more integrated, the more different disciplines working together, the better the outcomes in the built environment. Our main focus is on sustainable development, and in fact, the United Nations' sustainable development goals are our mission statement for the company and we feel that we can really move the needle since we touched so many projects in the built environment globally, every year, we can really move the needle in that direction.  Interesting. So, I'm curious about the sustainable development part of it. Is that a pivot that the company has made seeing where things are going, or is that kind of always been in the DNA or has been for some time?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: I'm really happy to say that sustainable development has always been in the DNA. Arup's been a leader in this place and has been leading in these concepts of sustainable development for 30+ years, if not longer. There are certain professionals here, Joe De Silva, for example, in the UK, who have been leading in sustainable design and development thinking for over 30 years, and really, we are happy to see that the sustainable advice practice that we have as the world is caught up to really understanding that this is a priority and a necessity. So not a pivot at all. In fact, something that we're just really happy to see is that everyone is focusing on it and prioritizing it as much as the firm is. I was recently at a conference in Europe about digital signage. One of the major discussion points was what they coined as green signage and the whole idea of sustainability. I led a number of panels, one focused on the North American market, and I told the audience and confirmed it with the North American panelists. While green signage is a big deal, and there's a lot of discussion around sustainability in Europe and other parts of the world, it's barely on the radar in the US and Canada, perhaps to a lesser degree, with a notable exception, maybe very large corporations, but most businesses really aren't talking about it yet. Gideon D'Arcangelo: I think that's right that America tends to be and in Canada, North America tends to be a bit behind on this, and you get the leadership from Europe, from the UK, other parts of the world, I think, because resources are more constrained over there, frankly, and they're getting to understand the limitations of resources. They're better than we do here yet, but everyone has come to terms with that quickly. So we tend to learn a lot from what's happening in Europe and bring it to the Americas because we know it's what's coming next.  Yeah. Some of the European guys were saying just about any RFP or tender that you get that's right up top, they want to know about your sustainability point of view and practices as well. One of the American guys said that in the last three years, we've never seen it in a tender; it's not even stipulated.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Yeah, it'll get there. It'll get there. It reminds me just of a project that I did at ESI back in 2015 for PNC Bank. PNC Bank, you may know, has just been a leader in the sustainable development of their real estate fleet for years, and there was a wonderful man named Gary Salson at the time, who was the director of real estate and commissioned the PNC Tower in downtown Pittsburgh, which at the time was the greenest sky riser and among the top 5 greenest sky rises on earth really pushed the envelope in terms of green design of a building. I was at ESI at the time, and we were commissioned to create a digital display component, the sculpture component is part of the lobby experience. That was intended to give the building a voice and have it talk about how it was using resources or how it was saving resources really ahead of its time, fantastic project, and for that, we had to design our own canvas, our own display, because we couldn't put a big energy hog in the building to tell the story of the building. It was an interesting design challenge.  So you were at ESI for a whole bunch of years, right?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: I was at ESI for 24 years, so yeah, a long time. That's where I grew up in my career.  Fantastic experience. What was your role there by the time you moved on?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: I was in the organization's leadership by the time I moved on. I also led our business development and marketing. In the end, there, I became a multidisciplinary creative director on some of our projects, for example, leading the design lead on this PNC Beacon Project. I joined the firm as a UX designer. We called it an interactive media designer in the mid-90s when I joined the firm.  Almost pre-digital.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Yeah, it was right at the cusp of all that stuff, and ESI was always leading edge in that regard, and we had a team of people that did interactive design when there were very few people in New York City at least the very few firms doing that at the time. So that's how I grew up doing UX/UI designs for Museum interfaces. I was always into working in the built environment, creating some interesting museums and corporate programs. But over time, being there as long as I could, I was able to move into the position of design lead, where I could speak to the different disciplines required to deliver these experiences. So we have physical designers, technology designers, hardware folks, software designers in both front and backend software design, visual design, graphic design, both static and motion, and content people as well as writers who are in practice. Directing that whole team together, is how you get these comprehensive experiences, and so that was what I was doing at ESI by the end of my career.  And it's the kind of company that while it's substantially in that particular space, in comparison to a rep or those kinds of companies quite small and you would have been contracted into projects like PNC and so on, as opposed to leading them versus I assume now with the rep that you guys are largely leading these projects.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: That's right. It's a different dynamic. When I moved to Arup, it was really about making a jump in scale and so from working in a 50-person boutique pioneering innovative firm in New York for a couple of decades, going to a global firm that's operating at a whole different level of scale, really excited me, and I thought this was a really interesting place to experience design because it was being recognized in the marketplace in different ways. Various architecture firms were building up their experience in design practices. Arup was really interesting to me because it's primarily an engineering firm and so brings the deep technical acumen that no architecture firm could really bring to the table. So, I was attracted to a firm like Arup that could push into the next generation of experience design at much larger scales than we've ever seen it before.  So would you be competing for jobs with the populaces of the world in Gensler, or are they a different element of it?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Again, it all just depends on the context. We work with the populace. We work with Gensler all the time in various capacities on very big projects. There are ways to carve out scope for an Arup alongside our partners like populace and Gensler. In some cases, we might find ourselves going up against each other for a certain piece of scope. All you know is that just happens in the course of business, depending on the client's situation and the way the scope has been described.  I'm guessing massive projects, but, at the end of the day, it's still a fairly small community, like the folks that at Populous and Gensler are some of the other companies?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Yeah, for sure. It's a tightly-knit world. We have a lot of respect for each other and we cross paths a lot at various, professional crossroads and conferences, that sort of thing.  So how was it to go from a company where you knew what everybody else was doing, and you're of the same mindset to ending up in meetings with civil engineers and people who were experts in water treatment facilities and so on?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Yeah, great question. I think that it was, first of all, exhilarating and inspiring, and invigorating. All of those things were really great. They were a catalyst for my thinking and what I wanted to do with my practice. I feel that the real part of being a good experience designer is being a good integrator of disciplines and being able to speak the language of multiple disciplines really fluently and so even at ESI, five different disciplines, it was not unusual, but a special mix of different expertise that were brought together. You had hardware people, you had people that knew about onsite construction and physical constructability, but you had people working on UX and UI design, and you had to be able to speak all those different languages, and dropped into Arup, suddenly 50 other languages to learn quickly, and, to really get, but there were many people that were interested in working with these integrated projects. So we have a fantastic lighting design here. We have acousticians of the highest order. We have fantastic AV designers but also even on the engineering side, we'll bring in folks that are working on urban planning. It was really interesting for me to find which folks resonated with what we were talking about. Actually, we did a project in Providence, Rhode Island, where Arup, led the master plan for what was called the unified vision for Downtown Providence. It was one of the early projects that I did here, supporting one of my colleagues in the Boston office, where we took an experienced design approach to planning how to renovate and reinvigorate Downtown, and for that, we were working on a larger scale than I'd ever worked before. It was a whole Downtown district. We're putting experience design interventions into this plan, but we're also looking at the engineering of the site and how to make it ready for public use in a variety of ways. So we worked both on the front end and on the back end, and all the infrastructure was as much a part of our design as the front-end experience pieces. That's what I was looking to do when I came here, and in fact, we did that, and it was a really interesting part of the design. It was so fascinating. We realized after a while that, after our Flood Modelers from the water team took a look at this and saw that the site was really going to be compromised in 50 years. We started to come up with a different design, building bridges, rather than digging tunnels, and a variety of things were done to actually shape the architecture of the site to anticipate the next 100 years and so I was like, that's the kind of thing we can do at Arup with this really highly integrated set of disciplines all under one roof.  Yeah, and that integration, I assume, is absolutely essential that you cannot operate in silos.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Exactly, and I think that's been my skill, Dave, over the years: I'm a horizontally oriented person, and I'm a good interlocutor or translator. I can quickly pick up a language enough to understand what's critical in that one group and, make sure that constraint maybe is understood by another group that can't quite see it, and that's how I think you get to highly integrated design and make sure basically keep people talking to each other and keep working with each other, because every organization fights with silos because it's just the nature of larger organizations. It can be deadly if that happens, though, right?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Exactly. It's mission-critical, So Arup is, I think, smart in the fact that we have people that cut across as well, like myself, and I'm not the only one who cut across as well as we have deep expertise in our disciplines.  You can go into an engineering meeting and not be bored to tears or completely confused by what's going on. Gideon D'Arcangelo: No, It's fascinating. It was just wonderful, always intellectually stimulating, and a really, really amazing group of talent here.  I have to say Arup came on my radar because of a post I wrote several weeks ago about JFK and one of the new terminals. I saw that your company was involved in that. Even though you're huge, I'm old and stupid, and I was completely unaware that you guys existed. That was intriguing to me. What were you doing there? And is that a typical project?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: That is a project that I am leading so I can really give you a good view into that, and I think it's an expression of all the things we have just been talking about the integration of multiple parts of a project that might in the past have been thought about as disparate or separate, and since the middle of 2022, Arup has been leading what the client calls the Art Branding and Digital Experience program of JFK New Terminal One and it came about because the Terminal has aspirations to be in the top terminals in the world when it opens in 2026, and it's known that these elements: a proper art program, a proper branding and storytelling program, and digital experience installations are all part of creating a true 21st-century Airport Terminal, and also, this is part of the larger context of the overall upgrade that's happening to all 3 of New York's airports, LaGuardia, JFK and Newark, and some of those new terminals are already online. You may have seen what happened at LaGuardia Terminal B was fantastic, right? I'm a lifelong New Yorker, so I'm benefiting from this.  Arup was deeply involved with Delta LaGuardia Terminal C. In fact, I did some work on that and Newark Terminal A just came online, so a lot of great stuff is happening from here. It's a good time for that, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is leading that effort to really upgrade. And so as part of that, there's a real demand for this art branding and digital experience piece and the idea was that while the architect was making the base building, and Gensler is the base building architect, a fantastic team from Gensler is leading that, the client was looking for one team to give a very integrated passenger experience for you of what that layer was that storytelling and a sense of placemaking was going to be on the architecture and that was going to be delivered through art branding as they called it and digital experience, and so we took on that role at the time, and so we've been leading the vision for that layer and for that storytelling and placemaking piece. Since we started in 2022, we've gone through the strategy and design phases, and as you can imagine, 2026 isn't that far away. We're starting to move from design into production, and it was really key for that to make a strong narrative of what it meant to be coming into the New York airport and what's great about new Terminal One, Dave is, it's the only international terminal at JFK. People who are going to foreign lands are coming from foreign countries. So it's that kind of population coming through, and we had to create an experience really could only happen in New York. It couldn't be that this airport felt like something that was in Orlando or some other place it had to be for people coming from, coming, or New Yorkers departing or coming that it had to be something that could only happen in New York, and it's good that I'm a native New Yorker and I've lived here my whole life. I have a good sense of that. I like to think and we were really helping craft that narrative. We then put together a team to work with us, and so we brought onto our team, Eddie Opara from Pentagram is leading the branding effort. We brought on a wonderful art curator team called CultureCore, who we've worked with in the past, at Arup that is leading the art curation, and then Arup is leading the digital experience design aspect of that, creating a whole set of digital canvases that are integrated into the architecture and a real media architecture style way throughout the terminal experience, both on departures and arrivals, and then a company that you know about we brought on, just last year after about a year into the process we brought Gentilhomme out of Montreal to develop the digital content for those digital canvases. We have a really amazing team that we're working with.  Another cool part of this project is that the client asked us to collaborate with the advertising partner for the terminal, Clear Channel to have this art branding and digital experience program complement what they were doing and work hand in glove, like one experience. I'm happy that our client had the vision to do that, and the teams worked really well together to make something that was really passenger-centric and focused on what passengers needed every step of the way so that they worked together. It's they don't, there's no cacophony or competing for eyeballs and imagery. Instead, they work together because we work together and crafted the program.  How practically would that work in terms of, when you say they're working together, the digital at a home and the experiential art pieces?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Yeah, there are many examples of that. Simply, we would work through each space and say, where are some of the high-value places where Clear Channel will do what they were doing and take that area, and then right next to that, we might put something that brings you into a New York sense of place, creating a moment, and so we went area by area and again, working together, it was going to really compose it together, I would say, and saying, hey, this area is good for that, and that area is good for that, and so one program came out of that. So that's what I mean.  Okay. So it means you're not running into conflicts around things like sight lines and you can design this in a way that makes sense as opposed to designing a terminal and designing where the experiential digital pieces go and then Chird Channel comes in and say, okay, what's left? Where can I put stuff?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Exactly, because you know, everyone's important in this program and we did it. What's cool about it, I think, was we took a human-centric or passenger-centric approach to make those decisions and just thought, how can we make a great experience for passengers, and meet all the needs of the advertising program, meet all the needs of the experience design program, and keep it all organized that way. I'm just always curious how companies such as yours invest a lot of time and have a lot of deep conversations with their customers. How do you define experience? Because when I think of an airport, my idea of experience is perhaps different from some others. I'm intrigued by the big experiential art things and LED video walls and so on, because that's what I do. But for me, a great experience is wayfinding and status boards to tell me, “Am I late?” “Am I early?” “Where do I go?” All those sorts of things.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Those are also critical foundational parts of a quality experience. So that's a great question. I just gave a talk last week to an aviation group, and that's one of the things I said is wayfinding is the foundation of passenger experience design.  It's boring, but it's incredibly important.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: It's critical, and for a geek like myself, it's not even boring and it's just so key, and it's not easy, and it's always being innovated, and in fact, there's a lot of innovation happening with digital in wayfinding now that we're quite involved in, actually, not so much on New Terminal 1 project, but other airport terminals and other places.  The functional experience design has to be right, and that's critical things. I'll just use an aviation example in a terminal. It's crystal clear where you need to go. It's crystal clear how much time it's going to take you and how much time you may have. You might want features on a mobile device that help you understand how you can get on tethered from your gate and roam and shop and eat and do a variety of things before you get on your plane. Those are key, and then there's the more ambient placemaking, sense of place environmental work also.  In this case, what we're doing with the New Terminal 1 is really that second category: creating that sense of place, telling that story, doing something that's all only in New York and doing that through a variety of means. It is that a whole other program is, in fact, happening for New Terminal 1 and one of the things I didn't mention. We also looked really hard at the wayfinding program to make sure that everything we were doing built off of that, too. There's a whole other because you have to pay attention to that functional side. We do work, though, in other environments where our team will get into the functional side as well as the ambient environmental side, because they really need to work together as one.  I guess it changes with every project, but I'm curious, most typically, where does your team start and stop? Or where does Arup start and stop on a typical project? Or is there no such thing as typical?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: There's no such thing as typical, but of course, that's a broad answer because every project is really interesting and unique. No, but we start early. We're a whole life cycle company and we work with our clients that way because we are strategists. Still, we're also builders wearing hard hats on site, making sure that everything got installed according to the strategy and the design, and the big movement right now, in my opinion, Dave, what's happening in the built environment world is the shift from design and construction into operations is getting increasingly smoothed over and thought through in a different way. So, a building was finished, and then people moved in, and there were various tasks like adding other things. “Add” is a term from air operational readiness that air airports used to shift from construction into operations because it has to work on day one; you can't take a few days to get it right. It has to work the moment it opens, you open the door. So there's a whole process, and Arup has that team. We can bring that to our clients as well, because our understanding of the design and construction process and the commissioning process at the very end, as it shifts into operations, gives us expertise in a way to make that as smooth as possible. But beyond that, there is a whole movement of using the tools, the digital tools that you create and design and construction as models that then can be brought through into operations and putting sensors into the building and putting a variety of things into the design of the building, so as you move out of design and construction, you have a digital model of the building that you can help use to operate and maintain and work with facilities management and other teams that are helping that building to operate more efficiently once it's opened. So, the long answer to your question is that we really will start when there's a blank sheet of paper with our clients and help strategize what needs even to happen all the way through. Of course design is our main bread and butter. Of course, we stay on during construction to oversee construction to ensure it's delivered as designed and then increasingly into operations in that whole life cycle. I'm guessing that when your career started, digital was something that was perhaps added on, thought about later in the game, and I'm wondering now, is the visual digital components of big projects are now fundamental to the overall thinking?  Like it's not something that's added on later. They're talking about it right from inception.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Definitely. It's a good insight, and I've seen that over the course of my now 30-year career to see the shift in that where initially we would have to work hard to convince the clients, even to consider some of these things, and then over time, about 10 years in, you started to see them showing up in a variety of ways and then increasingly they just become, as you say, just part of the program and assumed part of the program. But there's still such a long way to go on that front. And I've always thought that this idea of digital and physical being separate is a design problem of our age.  In a hundred years' time, people will just see that we got through that design problem and just digital permeates everything you do because it's, why wouldn't it? It's a smart way to go, and it's an innovation and human ingenuity and history. So right now there's a lot of work for bringing the digital mindset into every aspect of life, and particularly into the built environment. The built environment has been slow to pick up on this. So construction is really now in this kind of really exciting phase, the virtual design and construction where these digital tools are coming in and taking off, but there's a long way to go. I like to think of Arup as a leader in digital-physical integration, that's a task of our day, digital-physical integration. It's not like digital something off on the side, but then you do it at the end or do it in a box. Instead, you think of it from the very beginning and build it into every aspect of how you design, deliver, and operate the project.  Yeah. I think it's exciting that we're getting very close to a level that LED displays, both physical ones and ones that are embedded in glass, and things like that can now be thought about as building materials that you can use as a wall. Is it necessarily going to be mahogany or travertine tile or whatever. It can be like LEDs that can be changeable when as much as they need to be changeable.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Absolutely. I worked with Michael Schneider when he was at ESI, with me. We often talked about that as we talked about media architecture as that was an emerging term in the field. One of the things I really am grateful for working with ESI was the idea that media wasn't something that you attach to an environment in creating an interactive environment, you actually were working with this audio-visual material as you say, that becomes part of the architecture, and what's interesting about that though is then the client for that gets confusing because if you're putting in travertine or mahogany, you're talking to one side of the client, the design and construction folks. As soon as you put a dynamic piece of media in, who are you talking to? You're talking to that same client who's responsible for building that space. But suddenly you're also talking to the director of communications and the director of marketing and the storytelling people of the company. And that was something that I've always seen about this field. You needed to be able to talk to storytellers. That would be your CMOs, your directors of communications, your chief communication officers, as much as you could talk to the the head of real estate, that's building something. Where it worked well, you got leadership from both sides on the client that really understood what you were doing. As you put this material into the building, there's still the question of what it's doing. What story is it telling? Who's maintaining it over time? What's the content strategy? And that's what made it really exciting because it's different from putting a static tile on the wall. As soon as you put a media, an LED tile on the wall, it has a whole different governance aspect to it that is very modern, and I think now it is becoming standard. People expect that in their buildings.  All right. That was terrific. I know a lot more about Arup than I certainly did half an hour ago, and I suspect it'll be the same for a lot of listeners. Gideon D'Arcangelo: That's great. Thank you, Dave.  I appreciate your time.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Likewise. Great to talk with you.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I managed to talk the AV team running the main conference room at the recent Digital Signage Summit in Munich to give me the audio off the board for three of the sessions I either moderated or spoke on. The third of three that I did was an unscripted chat with conference hosts Florian Rotberg and Stefan Schieker, of invidis, that was billed as a Wake-Up Call for the Digital Signage Industry, and the three of us raised a series of issues that don't get enough attention and work. My big ones are, as always, having to deal with all the day to day BS put out by marketers, and related to that, the terrible job many to most of the marketers and business communicators do in this sector. Florian and Stefan get into other important topics. It all sounds serious, but we tried to make it a fun, worthwhile 30 minutes. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. No transcript, sorry!

I managed to talk the AV team running the main conference room at the recent Digital Signage Summit in Munich to give me the audio off the board for three of the sessions I either moderated or spoke on. The second of three that I did was focused on how to adapt to varying vertical markets, and that involved talking to companies focused on retail, food services and sports - Peter Critchley from Trison UK,  hospitality with Tim Hoddy of Uniguest, and Jan Reiners of Broadsign, which is all about digital OOH. This was the description for the 30-minute session: From DooH to Retail to Conferencing: in the digital signage business, it is all about the verticals. Different industries have very different requirements and pain points. So you need to adapt your strategies and products accordingly. But how can you identify these pain points? And how should you organize your portfolio to serve different verticals? Our panels of digital signage experts from different verticals will answer these questions. Speakers Jan Reiners, Broadsign, Sales Executive Tim Hoddy, Uniguest, VP Sales, Europe Peter Critchley, Trison UK, CEO Have a listen … Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. No transcript, sorry!

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I managed to talk the AV team running the main conference room at the recent Digital Signage Summit in Munich to give me the audio off the board for three of the sessions I either moderated or spoke on. The first was focused on IT security, which I will admit is NOT an area I'm overly conversant in. But I had a couple of good people who could come at it from different angles – Peter Critchley from Trison UK and Craig Francis of Google, who is arguably the main champion in the European market for the ties between digital signage and the Chrome OS and Flex ecosystems. This was the description for the 30-minute session: IT security has long been desperately neglected in a silo-architectural dominated digital signage industry. But today's CMS platforms are API-first, data-driven and fully connected. Secure and certified platforms are a minimum requirement for large enterprise customers, government and increasingly also SMB clients. What are today's IT security threats in general and what's the impact on digital signage? DSS Europe has invited IT security experts from Google and Intel to give first-hand insights into today's and tomorrow's risks and threats. Speakers Craig Francis, Google ChromeOS EMEA, Digital Signage Partner Manager and product expert Peter Critchley, Trison UK, CEO Have a listen … Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. No transcript, sorry!

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There's been a steady stream of announcements in the past couple of years about new sports and entertainment venues going up in the US and elsewhere, and one of the notable attributes about these developments is that they are not just stadiums and arenas - they're big commercial developments anchored by that kind of building but surrounded by retail, residential and infrastructure. They're sprawling, at times, and with that, not necessarily easy to navigate and use. An Australian software company called PAM has a tag line about transforming complex spaces into loved places, and it does that mainly through what people in digital signage would call wayfinding. But there's more going on with PAM than just maps. The company blends that base capability with a digital signage CMS, mobile, analytics, and integrations with business systems, including Ticketmaster. It also intertwines all these components so that they're reactive, with data from one component informing another. The company already has some big name, high profile clients and venues to reference, including SoFi Stadium in LA and the F1 circuit for Las Vegas. Robert Johnson is VP Sales for North America for the company, and he has a deep background in both wayfinding and digital signage. He got into the sector years ago, in the early days of Four Winds Interactive, and I've known him for ages now. So it was great to learn about PAM, but also just great to catch up. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Robert, great to catch up with you. I haven't seen you in years.  Robert Johnson: Likewise, Dave, it has been a while, and we go way back and it's great to reconnect with you.  I knew you from your time at Four Winds Interactive, where we were involved in a couple of pretty big deals. I was on the consulting side, and you were on the sales side when you were doing sales for that company. Could you give a background on your journey in digital signage?  Robert Johnson: Yeah, happy to, and you nailed it right there. You and I had a really exciting, fun opportunity to work on a couple of very large enterprise projects with some big names, great folks, and great clients and yeah, you and I cut our teeth together. That's where our relationship really spawned, but yeah, I was really fortunate, I got to start working with Four Winds Interactive when they were very quite small. I think when I started, there were somewhere between 25, and no more than 45 employees there. Were they still in the house or had they moved out by then?  Robert Johnson: Yeah, I was in the original mansion, the Parkside Mansion, right off of City Park in Denver, Colorado, and that was a trip. They had weddings on the weekends and we sold software during the weekdays in there until we had to break down our desks. But that was a startup life right there.  Looking back is interesting because that was 16 years ago when I took that job with them and looking back, there's a piece of me that says that you can make a Netflix story about the rise of the software company because the economy was crap, it was 2007-2009, and the housing market crashed. I remember my parents asking me like, how do you have a job? How was the company doing?  What on earth is digital signage?  Robert Johnson: Why are people spending money on digital signage? And I remember telling my parents, I was young, I was in my 20s and I was like, mom, dad, this is amazing. People are buying this left and right. It was the kind of product that if you could just demo it and talk about it, you were selling it.  I was fortunate that I got to move up in the ranks and work on a lot of large enterprise deals, selling very complex digital signage solutions with incredible integrations to Delta Airlines and JetBlue Airlines, Toyota, Lexus, Mazda, Staples, just massive digital signage implementations and yeah, we had lots of integrators and hardware involved and it was a ride, man. It was awesome.  So as it happens, people move on and you went to a new company but could you tell me what they were doing?  Robert Johnson: The connection is this: In the world of digital signage, I joke and say, I sold TVs for a decade, but on the TVs, on the screens, you're selling communications platforms, employee communications platforms, retail solutions, touchscreens, and wayfinding. Wayfinding has been a part of my life for a long time. We sold many wayfinding solutions, helping guests navigate stores, retail, malls, airports, and other places. I then moved to a company called Concept3D, which when I started, only had one product: a mapping product, but no signage, and for me, that was a breath of fresh air. I was able to eliminate all the hardware complexities because hardware fails, PCs and displays fail, turn on, turn off, and get vandalized, and for me, this was amazing. I could sell wayfinding without having to implement any hardware, and they have a phenomenal platform, but then their main focus was or is higher education and I was brought on to try to sell into enterprise solutions, and we had a few good deals in there, but then COVID hit and we launched another product for virtual tours and we did a bunch of other things in there. So they actually have five products now, all heavily focused on higher education, but the wayfinding piece always stuck around. We sold maps to anybody who wanted to visualize their space and anybody who wanted to enhance their space. If you're on a college campus and campuses are huge, they're square miles large, and so you need to navigate those environments.  Easy to get lost in them.  Robert Johnson: It's easy to get lost, and a lot of faculty, students, guests, and parents are frustrated trying to make that experience better, and so that was the plug.  So you were with that company and then I think you went on a hiatus or something, and now you're with a company called PAM. Robert Johnson: PAM, yeah, and this is not the cooking spray company. It's not spam. It's not Pam. Funny enough, and this is like an accident, but PAM is actually the word, map, spelled backwards.  Oh, okay. I was trying to figure out what an acronym was. Robert Johnson: Yeah, but that was not intentional. We actually had a customer bring it to our attention. Did you know that PAM is MAP backward? Anyway, it's Project Asset Management. That's actually what it stands for.  But PAM is really unique because it combines the last 16 years of my life into this amazing software platform that has been in development for the last seven years, and so we're still in the ramp-up phase, the startup phase. We're not quite a startup. We're in a kind of launch phase right now in terms of our trajectory with adding clients and growth, but they do a couple of things. We have a digital signage component where we power hundreds and hundreds of screens for large entertainment districts, sporting facilities, stadiums, and arenas and we specialize in interactive wayfinding.  We don't go to market as really either one of those. We go to market as a smart navigation platform helping cities, visitors, bureaus, and entertainment districts have a more frictionless, guest experience, and as in your world, Dave, the frictionless experience can be anything from how do you get parking? How do you find something? How do you get information on screens or your mobile device? We touch a lot of different communication mediums. It's a perfect fit for me. I've been there for two months now, and it's just been super exciting.  Were you looking around, or did they come to you?  Robert Johnson: A little bit of both out there when you've been in the space for a while, as we chatted before, you get approached by people, and certain things become a fit and, every day on my, on LinkedIn and stuff, I'd probably get hit up by a recruiter every day for something, or you get someone reaching out to you. So yeah, this just came across my plate. We chatted and chatted for a while. It wasn't one of those light switch things where you just turn on and jump ship. When you're our age, my age, your age, everything's pretty calculated at that point.  We're not our age. 'cause I'm way older than you.  Robert Johnson: Yeah, you're older than me.  I could be your father.  Robert Johnson: Fair enough.  I could even be your grandfather.  Robert Johnson: Yeah, wife, kids, all that stuff, and play, and I'm never just like making a brash decision to just jump because the technology is cool but yeah, it was a calculated decision, but once I got to dig into the software and see what these guys are about. Hindsight's 2020 and I'm just super, super glad I made the change.  This is an Australian company?  Robert Johnson: They are headquartered in Sydney but have an office in LA. Right now, I'm heading up the North American sales efforts, and they are very, very, hyper-focused on sports and entertainment districts. So yeah, we are taking a smart city, smart district approach.  It doesn't really happen as much in Canada because it's much, much smaller, but from what I can tell, any new sports venue that goes up is not just an arena, it's a district with residential, retail, dining, hotels, the whole nine yards. Robert Johnson: Yeah, you nailed it. Like I joke and tell teens, yeah, you might be on a football team or a baseball or basketball or hockey team, that's fine. But you're actually in the business of pro entertainment. You just happen to have a hockey team associated with you or a basketball team associated with you and if you're football, you only have 8-10 home games a year. If you're basketball, you've got 40 and hockey 40, but there's another 200 to 300 days a year that you need to be putting on events.  So if you Google, there are 200 stadiums currently being built, planned to be built, and contracted to be built in the next 24 to 36 months and if you just follow a few of the blogs online every week, every month, there's a new stadium that's being announced or a new district that's being announced to be built, and all of these are now very integrated in the city. They're very much funded by voters and the city council and the visitors bureaus. It's a fully integrated approach these days.  I would imagine they pretty much have to say this is a commercial property development, and not just a stadium for that very reason, with the exception, maybe, Texas, where there are high school football stadiums that will see 20,000.  Most cities don't want to spend 200 million or whatever the number is on something that's only going to get a handful of days of use. they really need to justify that. This is going to create a whole bunch of other jobs.  Robert Johnson: Yeah. Nowadays, when a stadium is being built, they look at the entire infrastructure. Do we need to bring internet lines? Where's transit? Where's the parking? Where's the bus situation? If that stuff isn't considered, then the project just won't happen. It's a fully integrated approach, and there are Oakview Group, Legends, and Populous, and there are these massive architects and developers out there who are building these for them, they're managing these event centers and stadiums for the teams and the cities, and it's a huge business.  That's actually the way that PAM approaches the market. We go one to one and we sell our software and platform to the teams and the arenas. But we also are working the angle very heavily with the architects, and so we're talking to these projects right when they're breaking ground years ahead of time.  Yeah, I assume that what's important to them is that they may understand they're going to have digital signage, directories, and some degree of wayfinding, but they don't want a gallery of different technology providers to do it for them. They would likely greatly prefer that there's one service provider that can do the screens but can also do the wayfinding, the phone app for navigation, and everything else, right?  Robert Johnson: Yeah, a hundred percent. We work with Gable and we work with Daktronics. We work with ABI SPL, the tech providers so that when ABI SPL is recommending a solution, that way they have one wayfinding provider that's for mobile, that's for web, that's for the digital signage, and when they would need to make an update and communicate… I use this example on some of my calls, I don't know if a year or two ago, Dave, you were up in this area, the Buffalo Bills at the end of one of the games had a massive brawl and there was a fight, and that's like an incident, right? So immediately safety, security, and people like that are trying to get involved, and if you need to communicate to 50,000 people leaving the event that there was an incident taking place, you don't want to update your text message provider, your mobile provider, your web provider, or get on the phone with your web management team security. You want to be able to go into one place and update. All your digital signage, all your communications, your mobile, everything with a click of a button, and that's the kind of stuff that we have the capability of doing. Just as an example, there are so many other things. Another cool thing that our software does when you think about planning and working with these different technology solutions is we have this really amazing data analytics platform where if there's an event happening on a Saturday, we can then show you this heat map that actually shows you all the dead zones. So if there's a dead zone on the South side of the entry and there's no internet right there, we'll actually be able to show you on the heat map that shows, as somebody was walking, there's a dead zone here and you may want to actually put additional, WiFi connections or routers or enhance the call-up Verizon or AT&T, your provider because there's a dead zone right there. So, our platform has the ability to do all these different things, which makes it really unique, and again, one of the reasons I'm grateful to be here.  Does the fact that you're working with stuff that's going to be on mobile phones as well, give you some sense of analytics as well, in terms of how people move around those kinds of spaces? Robert Johnson: Yeah, that's one of our value propositions, which is the ability to provide data crowd management so that you can make a better decision. So think about this: I live in Golden, and I'm actually going to do one of the playoff games on Monday with my wife. We're going to go to the Denver Nuggets game. If I open up the Denver Nuggets app and I get a no before you go message, and it's, hey Robert, you have prepaid parking at this lot over here, and I pull up my app and I use the PMA app to get there. The PAM app will then show that Robert Johnson because I'm logged into the, I got my profile set up with the Nuggets. It'll say that, Robert left his house in Golden via car, or Robert got on the train, went to Union Station, and got there. The team can then take that information back and say, look, you had 18,000 people at a sold-out game, and 4,000 of them took transit, they took a train to the game. You can take that back to your sponsors and your advertisers and Lexus and Toyota and those guys and say, look, you need to be advertising between the hours of five and six o'clock to all the people coming to the game and letting them know about the merchandise, food, beverage, coupons, parking, all of these things. So yeah, our platform can give that data to the team so they can make literal, actual business decisions that drive revenue and sponsorship revenue and value to their sponsors. It's really cool. I have been in the wayfinding space for 16 years, and none of the companies I've seen have the ability to do that. Yeah, I've always liked wayfinding, but the challenge I've always had with the stuff that you find on touch displays in shopping malls and so on is that you look up what you want, and it'll show you how to get there, but then you walk 10 paces and you can't remember where to turn or anything else. The next step is to put it on a phone, which gives you a little bit more, but it still seems a little disjointed from the rest of what goes on in a big space.  Robert Johnson: You'll like this, Dave, and I think you can probably validate it, as we're the only mapping platform that integrates with Ticketmaster and Ticketmaster Ignite. So again, using that mobile example, if I'm leaving the Nuggets game and I just had an amazing time and there's another game because there will be another playoff game. If I'm like, honey, let's do it, let's buy the tickets for Wednesday night's game. Right there. I can do that transaction, and if it starts on the map and I say, yeah, I want to buy tickets right here and get my parking, we can follow that journey, go back to the Nuggets at the end of the game, and say, look, you had 4,000 people buy tickets, and their journey started on the map.  There goes 600 bucks.  Robert Johnson: Exactly, there goes 600 bucks. But, like that's the thing that I, as a sales guy and sales professional, have always wanted to go back to my clients with and say, look, the map is generating revenue. We can see that people scan these hotdog coupons. We can see where people came from. You can go back to your sponsors. All of this and more, Dave, just makes PAM; it's the belief inside me that knows that PAM is going somewhere pretty spectacular in this space.  Yeah, I'm sure that, some of the entertainment districts and so on that look at this, and say, the experiential side is very nice that this helps people get around, but if you can take another couple of hops and say, and it'll generate incremental revenue for you or boost the average attendee profile in terms of what they buy and so on, then that gets them a lot more interested. Robert Johnson: It goes from a map turning into a really nice thing to have to, hey, this is something we really need and it provides value and impact.  So you mentioned that the company is ramping up, but I'm looking at the website and I don't want to rattle off names in case they're not accurate, but you're deployed in some fairly significant familiar areas, right? Robert Johnson: Yeah, I'd say the company has really been fortunate in the last 24 months. The Australian Open was massive. It covers a huge ground in Melbourne, where the city is almost shut down for that event. Hundreds of thousands of people come in. We've been contracted with SoFi Stadium since the stadium's inception and went live. That's the big one in LA for people who might not know that.  Robert Johnson: Yeah, they've got the Rams and the Chargers playing out of that stadium. Plus, it's a venue that hosts FIFA and the Super Bowl. I didn't realize this until a couple of months ago. The Super Bowl was just there, and the Super Bowl was the highest revenue-generating Super Bowl in the history of the Super Bowls because of the capacity and the venue drove so much revenue; the Super Bowl is going to be back there, not this season, but the following season. It is not normal to have back-to-back Super Bowls within two or three years of one another at the same facility. And yeah, we're powering the navigation experience for that as well. Our relationship with Formula One is super strong. We just knocked it out of the park with Las Vegas, and yeah, before this call this morning, I just had a call across the world with another Formula One venue because of our relationship with Vegas. So yeah, it's been a gift. I appreciate that you kept on giving.  Yeah. Let's talk about Vegas because that's an interesting one in that it's a facility that's built for three to four days as opposed to a fixed venue that, if you like, you might go repeatedly. If you're a season ticket holder, you know your way around. But with this, everything was somewhat temporary, with the exception of the PADEX. How did it manifest itself? What would be the PAM experience if I went to that I wouldn't because I just wouldn't want to deal with all the crowds,  Robert Johnson: Yeah, you nailed it. There are a couple of them out there. Miami is similar to Vegas because it's a semi-temporary structure. There are now some permanent structures at both venues, but there are a few of them out there, in the world, but yeah, Vegas, in particular, was really unique, and they had a lot of challenges that they were very proactive in trying to solve this. You had to walk through Caesars Palace. You had to walk through the Bellagio. You had to walk through some of these hotels to navigate to your seat, to your area, maybe the party, or the venue that you needed to get to.  I didn't have the ability to attend the event, but I know, for example, the Formula One Las Vegas hat sold out. It's an interesting fact that they didn't make enough. They didn't realize that, but that was the one piece of apparel that everybody wanted to buy.  Probably because it was the one thing they could afford.  Robert Johnson: It's the one thing that they could afford, but everyone wanted to walk away and wear their Formula One hat, and as a takeaway for the event, they're like, okay, we need to put more hats around, we need to allow people to buy this apparel easier, we need to help people get to those locations easier.  I think you'll find this interesting too, Dave. I talked a little bit about the data, the heat maps, and the journey maps that we provided a second ago. That was a huge win for Formula One and the casinos. We were able to go back and show them. I'm going to make the numbers up because I don't have them in front of me, but let's say throughout the weekend, 50,000 people needed to navigate through the Bellagio or the Caesars Hotel to get from point A to point B, and we showed it, we could visually show them people were going and why they were going there and what the places they searched for. But because it was the race's first time, we didn't do any interiors for the Bellagio or Caesars. We just had the exterior of the building.  So now we've contracted with those properties to do the interiors so people can more easily navigate those facilities and get to where they need to go because they were like, we spent way too long trying to get through this hotel. We didn't know how to get through.  Yeah, and Las Vegas is a textbook example of where navigation is incredibly valuable. I've been to Las Vegas 40+ times, and if I go into something like Caesars, I'm going to get lost. There are no straight lines.  Robert Johnson: Yeah, there's no straight lines at all. Our integration with Ticketmaster also played big into that one as well, again, if you're Dave and you bought a pass for you're going to be sitting at Turn 12, you're going to have parking around Turn 12. Your entrance is only going to be at Turn 12, and so when you want to scan your QR code or you want to get directions, our integration is going to say, we know Dave, bought parking here. We know he's staying at this hotel. We're going to get him to his property. Again, that integration with Ticketmaster was a really big value-added feature for the curated content experience.  So, how does the digital signage component work? Typically with a wayfinding application. It's a file that's going to sit in a digital signage schedule and that's how the two kind of sync up with each other. but I'm thinking it's probably a little different here.  Robert Johnson: Yeah, it is a little bit different. As you would expect, we have a content management system that allows us to manage the content on the map and the digital signage as well and so if you have a non-interactive sign, we can control the content on there. We can control the content if you have an LED parking sign. But there's a connection between the two, an integration between the two, where if parking lot G gets filled up, we can say it's full, and we're going to go ahead and let the digital sign or the LED board say it's full. We're also going to provide that update on the map as well or the interactive kiosk so that all of that content is married up into one kind of seamless user interface.  So it's all integrated as opposed to, I'm going to do something with the mobile app and the wayfinding component of this, then I'm going to back right out of that and then launch the digital signage piece and do other things. Robert Johnson: Yeah, exactly. The name of that platform with the digital signage is called 360 Live. That's what we call it. It's like a full 360 experience, but that's the idea. You don't have to go into two or three different systems. We don't have multiple content management systems. We've got one that has its parking application. We've got one that just handles navigation. We've got one that handles the digital signage, but when you make an update on one, it updates across all of them. You mentioned Daktronics and Gable. I'm assuming you guys avoid the hardware side of it. Robert Johnson: Yes, thank goodness. We do. I would have nightmares if I had to get back into the hardware game. So yeah, we work with those guys to partner with them on the hardware piece.  So is it something that you license via SaaS, or is it an on-prem thing?  Robert Johnson: Yeah, it is SaaS. We're a software as a service company. We have managed services as well, but yeah, like a lot of companies nowadays, we have an ongoing recurring annual software fee that includes software support, maintenance updates, all the features we roll out. We've got initial set up fees for us to build out the beautiful artwork set things up and get it integrated. but once it's up and running, our clients can manage it on their own.  Formula One's done a great job of that. SoFi has done a great job of that. But a lot of these teams have really small marketing teams, and they rely pretty heavily on their vendors and so we do a lot of hands-on management of their applications for them.  We've known each other for a long time. One thing that I've noticed on LinkedIn in the last, I don't know, two or three years is a lot of posts by you about something called the Robert Johnson project, and it seems like you've been on something of a personal journey and the undertone of, it seems to be that you realized I was working my ass off and maybe not paying enough attention to my family.  Robert Johnson: You nailed it, Dave. You really did, and that probably just comes from years of experience that you have ahead of me. I've always been big in professional development and training and things like that and I started working very closely with a coach and coach, Townsend Wardlaw. I don't, Townsend Wardlaw. A good friend of mine, who I have known for 20 years, came back into my life, and yeah, I spent a lot of time working with him, I used to think that the number one thing in my life was work and success and money and getting up the food chain and I did a lot of that and I, and there was a kind of a cost to it, and the cost was a lot of travel. What you and I did together on occasion, a lot of it was late nights and dinners and president's club and all that stuff was awesome.  I had two kids while I did all that, and man, it's tough because without having done all that, I wouldn't be the person I am, and I wouldn't have a lot of the success maybe that I've had, but I pumped the brakes as I got close to 40. I joke, Dave, and I say I could write a book called 38-39-40, and when I was about 38, this all kind of came to a head, and I realized, the number one thing in my life is my kids, my wife, then sales and me. If I can work on all those things and put my family ahead of everything else, everything else will follow, and I'll still be able to have a really successful life. Yeah, I posted a lot about that on LinkedIn, and I still do occasionally because it's a big part of what I'm doing. Now when I think about LinkedIn, I've got three kinds of things or passions, and one is my life. One is sales. I love posting about just sales, and then one is PAM and those are like the three buckets of things I enjoy talking about and posting about, and I don't have to try to do it. It just comes out naturally. So a lot of people have that journey and realize, you know what, I need to pay more attention to my family and not be so obsessed with work, but they don't call it a project, and they don't put it up on LinkedIn. That's not a criticism in any way. I'm just saying I'm curious why you did that.  Robert Johnson: Wow. Why did I do it? Everyone's different, but for me, when you say something, you hear it, and you put it out there, it just becomes real. It becomes really tangible and real, and it becomes something that you live by, you wake up, and you know it is there, and you can come back to it every time something bad happens, you have a bad day, or if something didn't go the way you wanted it to. When you go back to what your purpose is… I have a purpose and my purpose, it goes, actually goes in this order. I misstated earlier, but it's my wife, it's my kids, it's me and it's sales. Those four things are my purpose on LinkedIn. I've got another mission statement, and it's to connect with, motivate, and inspire as many people as possible. I come back to those things. If anybody asks, what are you doing on LinkedIn? And I said, look, I just. I just want to connect with people. Why do you want to connect with people? I want to see, if maybe I can motivate somebody. Maybe I can help somebody. Maybe I can inspire somebody. It hasn't been quite two years, Dave. I started my journey. It was like September, almost 18 months ago, and man, I helped a friend. I said, now she's a friend, a woman at the time who really wanted to get into Formula One, and I made a couple of introductions, and literally about four months after I made some introductions to her, she was on a plane to the UK and gave a live in-person talk about UX and UI design to Silverstone. And that's inspirational and motivational to me and it all started with a connection, and LinkedIn serves a lot of purposes. That stuff just makes it exciting and fun, and I'm going to keep doing it as long as it's still exciting and fun.  As you know, running a podcast and stuff can sometimes feel like work, and when it becomes work, and it becomes really hard, and it's not fun anymore, I'm sure that you would probably just turn it off and walk away if it became really painful and crappy.  All right, Robert. You talked about connecting, and it was great reconnecting with you. We need to stay in touch more. Robert Johnson: Yeah, Dave, really appreciate the reconnect here. This has been great, man. I'm just so happy for you with your business and everything you got going on and, yeah, thanks again for having me on. 

Jay Leedy probably had a bunch of options open to him when he decided he'd done his job with Sony's pro display team, and it might have surprised some of his industry friends when he signed on with a much smaller company, New York-based Videri, as its Senior VP for Strategic Alliances. It didn't surprise me, because Videri has been on a bit of a tear in the last few months, hiring well-connected and respected senior people away from other companies active in digital signage. That came out of a $20 million fundraising round announced late last year. I did a podcast about a year ago with Videri CEO Wes Nicol, so I didn't want to spend too much time talking again about Videri's product and services. We get into that and what attracted Leedy, but what I was really interested in hearing about was his point of view on the CMS software market. His prior role with Sony was building up the digital signage software ecosystem, which involved talking to and looking at scores of different companies. He eventually onboarded some 90 in his three-plus years there, about 70 of them CMS software firms. So Leedy has a pretty unique perspective on what's out there, and how companies differentiate themselves in what remains a very crowded CMS software market. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jay Leedy, thank you for joining me. You've had some big changes in the last few weeks.  Jay Leedy: Thank you. I have. Thanks for having me, Dave. It's great to hear your voice.  Yeah, you don't want to see me.  Jay Leedy: It's been a couple of months since I saw you last at ISE, but yeah, some changes that were on the horizon at ISE kind of came to fruition over the last several months, and I'm happy to say I'm in my fourth week, almost complete with my fourth week here at Videri. Wow, you're almost past probation. Are you going to make it?  Jay Leedy: They haven't kicked me out yet. My wife told me that the paycheck showed up in our bank account yesterday. Yay!  Things are rocking. I knew you when you were with Convergent and Diversified then you went over to Sony. Am I missing anything there? Jay Leedy: I think that's the extent of my career in this space. I got introduced to integrations prior to moving to Convergent through a company that had point-of-purchase display manufacturing as their core and had a division that focused on, what we called Intelligent Loss Prevention. We were basically importing a lot of technology solutions to solve theft prevention in retail and that's how I got exposed to systems integration, and when I saw digital signage as a part of that, I naturally gravitated toward that. I saw there was going to be a big growth arc and fortunately, I've been right so far.  We can get into what you were doing with Sony because I'm intrigued by the role you had and the unique perspective that was offered, but I'm curious because when you started thinking, okay, I've done my job here with Sony and what's my next thing? What compelled you to go to Videri, I suspect you had a number of options.  Jay Leedy: Yeah, it's a good question. The little background that I just gave you is in part why Videri was really appealing to me. You're right. I had really broad exposure to the market across a number of technologies, not just digital signage, and was considering options outside of digital signage, to be perfectly honest, but the reason that Videri was compelling for me was a couple of reasons.  One is the, very strong push they were making into the market with some clear funding and a product offering that was differentiated in displays that were very thin and lightweight looking and appealed to the sensibilities of retailers and designers and the folks that I really like engaging with on the creative side of our business, combined with software that really makes it easy to make these things pop and, deliver what we call orchestration of content across multiple canvases of displays to unify those.  But there were some other things that went into that as well. I met Rob Avery, who had recently joined the company from Scala, at your event at ISE. I'd already met Wes Nicol, the CEO, about a year prior, and then Steven Jenkins, who I'd worked with at Diversified, had recently joined as the CRO along with Nathan Jones, who I'd also worked with as a Managing Director for North America. So there are already some pieces in place, and when I met Rob and we chatted briefly about his point of view on where we are versus where he wanted to take the software on the roadmap, that really clicked with me. Then we announced Jeff Griffin coming in as a retail technology guru and a guy who was at the genesis of what we called Walmart TV. So it wasn't even digital signage when he was involved with that deployment. So he's had a long history of selling into that market, and really the last piece to fall into place for me was, we secured, Tom Ross from NowSignage and I think he must eat energy bars constantly. He has the most energy and passion for the channel of any guy that I've met in this industry, and I've met a lot. All of those things coming together was really a big part of making that decision for me. Yeah, it's interesting. I've told the story a few times of couple of years ago at DSC in Vegas, some company called Videri had reached out to me and said, could you come to our suite at ARIA and have a look at our pots and pans? And I said, I'm super busy, and so on, and they bugged me and on the last day in the afternoon, I was dead tired, but I said, okay, fine, because I was staying next door and I didn't know a damn thing about them and met them, walked this endless hallway to get to their suite and they showed me these flat panel displays.  I thought, oh, dear God, I've walked all this way to see some skinny displays, but then they started to explain what they're up to, the business model and how they were working with a very large Austrian energy drink brand that they're not allowed to officially talk about, and I thought, now I get it, and over those, intervening two years, the company has really grown in terms of marketplace visibility and everything else and they have a somewhat unique, not entirely unique, but somewhat unique product.  Jay Leedy: Yeah, I agree. In fact, I was registered to go to that same event but couldn't get there because I was super busy that week. I also didn't have a relationship with them yet. So I didn't yet feel obligated, but I didn't see their product until Digital Signage Week, or maybe it was NRF, one of the two where they had a hospitality event at their offices in New York and I made my way there and I was as compelled as you were because of what they were doing but also where they were saying they were going. And you're right. The visibility for Videri has been exponential. I think as contemporaries in our sphere of the industry have gotten more visibility to their hardware and a better understanding of whether software can cause the entire industry to really lean in and that's been the case. I think when I announced that I was leaving Sony combined with two days later announcing that I was joining Videri, I never had as much web traffic on my LinkedIn as those two days. I think it was something on the order of 15,000 impressions between the two posts and that tells me that there's a lot of people who were really intrigued about what this new company is and as I've gotten deeper into the organization and started to really look around at the core architecture of our software, which is an Android-based SoC. So all of our displays run Android 12, which offers a lot of opportunity for third-party solutions to run alongside ours, or in some cases, in place of our software with our firmware being the glue that binds the delivery of that software, and I think there's a lot of opportunities in that regard as well, right?  My goal will really be to build out an ecosystem and a partner strategy very similar to what I was doing at Sony and fortunately, I have a lot of existing relationships that I was already working with that can parlay right into that, that are all dialed into that Android approach, but I think Android, in particular, was compelling for me because it has become a de facto standard in many respects and in a lot of cases with retailers, because of the security components to it, and our particular flavor of Android is locked down, which is really appealing. all the stars really aligned there.  It's interesting because Android, if you asked people out five years ago, they would probably say no, not going anywhere near that. Jay Leedy: I know when I was Diversified, it was an absolute non-starter, but the market's changed, and fortunately the strength of Android and the security protocols have changed, and I think it's you and I've talked about a little bit, right? The impression and kind of point of view on Android Deployed in enterprise environments has changed as well. I think largely because of the broad use of MDMs or device management solutions and familiarity with those tools, with IT admins having a level of comfort with those. At the end of the day, displays for digital signage are IOT devices that have to be managed and locked down in a similar fashion. So something that's familiar just resonates with those decision makers.  You mentioned a couple of minutes ago third party suppliers or providers.  Are you saying, and you can correct me if I'm getting this wrong, that if I'm another CMS software company, I could, in theory, drive Videri displays? Jay Leedy: Absolutely, and we've already tested a handful of them. I think we've got about five so far. We've also tested some lift-and-learn solutions that are quasi-CMS but would also be able to run in concert with our CMS.  That'd be like Glass Media stuff? Jay Leedy: It's more like Sign Metrics. We're on ARC over at Pick‘n'Watch. He's got a really interesting solution that's all Bluetooth and UDP-based. We're also looking at wireless solutions for audience measurement, the likes of Blue Zoo or Movia Media.  Some of the CMS platforms that we've tested, run the gamut of the kind of those that are known more heavily in the space, like Spp Space and Corbett, and then others that are maybe lesser known like Play Signage or one of the newer ones that, as you mentioned earlier, the idea of a hobby business that's not yet full bore or fully funded or has a sales and marketing team behind it, what have you… There's a company called AbleSign that's got some pretty capable products. Largely a lot of these are available as progressive web app options where the device management capabilities of their full-featured apps are stripped out and therefore don't present a conflict with some of the remote capabilities that are the device management capabilities that we bring to bear. But, in the longer term, we'll also test scenarios where maybe a full-featured solution could be used or what we see more as a trend; why I was looking maybe outside of digital signage, in other technology providers, is that, especially in North America, and I think that this will cascade to other markets is that enterprise clients, in particular, have a point of view on device management. So, it was really important when I was at Sony to be compatible with whatever infrastructure decisions had been made upstream so that we could just say yes to projects and be specified regardless of what the requirements were. To some extent, that's a consideration with Videri's approach as well. It's interesting, with this idea that you can work with other CMS software companies. I'm trying to envision that phone call or that meeting on their end, wouldn't they be saying that you have a software that competes with our software?  Jay Leedy: Yeah, but I think we also have a really attractive line of hardware, right? The kind of customer that will gravitate towards our hardware may, in some cases, already have an investment and an existing state of software that they don't want to deviate from. So it may make sense for us to offer our hardware with some recurring fees for the support and device management components while also being able to enable content management on a familiar platform that is more broadly used across their estate. Those are scenarios that we're gaming out.  What drew my attention in the tippet area is how the square displays in particular were something that could replace old beverage brands' neon or plastic backlit signs in bars and restaurants. It was something that was dynamic, the quick ROI that would come out of that, but I've seen Videri in particular marketing, multi-screen video cone matrix. I think there's another word you guys use.  Jay Leedy: We call it an orchestration, but yeah, it'd be a mosaic or a configuration of multi-canvas screens that, in some cases, we're seeing incorporated with other visual merchandising elements or other artwork elements in hospitality applications, for example. You might like static, traditional artwork and imagery interspersed with dynamic elements that are part of Videri. The entire wall can very easily be mapped, and content pushed and split across the displays so that it makes sense visually without a lot of hardware to deliver that, and I think that's really a unique element of our software.  Yeah, and I like the ability to mix and match squares and rectangles display canvases and I know Samsung had a square product years ago, and it came and went because they like to sell hundreds of thousands, not thousands of units, but it came back with this and because manufacturers in Asia are now able to natively manufacture square things instead of cutting a rectangle and turning it into a square, redoing the electronics and costing a lot of money.  Jay Leedy: Yeah, the run rate on our square product versus the other ones is probably not as high, to be fair, but those unique shapes and, I think, more specifically, smaller form factors, the lighter weight, the bezels are only probably about three quarters of an inch thick. The fact that they're low-voltage offers a lot of flexibility. We've got a shop fitter or a point-of-purchase display manufacturer in Germany that's developed a unique bracket that allows these displays to be moved around in their modular system. The entire system is powered with low voltage.  It's a company called Visplay, and they've done some really interesting stuff. These powered, essentially track systems or grids have ports, and the brackets are designed to automatically pick up power as soon as they do. Once they hit the Wi-Fi, they just start playing content again. So it gives the retailer or the shop fitter a lot of modularity, and they don't have to get a technician on-site to make these changes. It's something that they can do with store staff and that's really appealing as well.  That's interesting. I've been doing a lot of reading and paying a lot of attention to the whole retail media networks landscape of late because it's obviously got a lot of traction, even though much of the spending now is not in the store but billboards and online, but it's going that way and I've said and heard from people that it's not going to be a second wave of stores, putting big ass LCD displays on every available surface like it maybe was in the 2010s when athletic wear retailers, in particular, were doing that.  It's going to have to be smaller displays and interesting displays that fit into the design and are designed from the start or ones that don't get in the way of merchandising. Jay Leedy: Yeah, exactly. I think we've seen that in various gestations over the last several years, especially in consumer packaged goods, brands will incorporate digital elements as part of a turnkey fixture package. It's one of the things I was working on with Diversified prior to the pandemic, and unfortunately, the pandemic killed the momentum on a project that was really promising for us. But it was in partnership with Westrock, and the idea was that, as Diversified, we would be the integrator and managed service provider to support design, build, and ultimately manage and service these things once deployed. Westrock designed the fixture and also what they called kit packing. So they brought in inventory from their partner at the time, GlaxoSmithKline. They fully merchandised a display fitted with graphics and then added our digital elements with an LTE modem cradle point. As soon as the store personnel received it, which they wielded into place, they didn't have to have a technician. Essentially, they had a turnkey solution that, as soon as it was plugged in, called home and had a range of content that would be played based on a number of parameters. There was an integrated camera.  So, I think there's a really appealing turnkey solution that doesn't have to rely on the retailer's data infrastructure, which is usually fairly constrained. This gives the brands a lot more freedom for placement but a lot more control over execution as well as the ability to, as you rightly said, put digital in places where you wouldn't expect it, and that's a hallmark of our approach, right? These smaller screens are unique form factors that are less obtrusive and don't detract from the merchandising but actually can complement it, and you're right, I think retail media networks will manifest in that way so that it's not an afterthought. It's not a screen that's hanging from the ceilings left in front of the end cap, but it's actually integrated into the end cap or into the merchandising fixture or what have you. So it really does the job of carrying the brand message, and I think there's a lot of appeal there, especially in lifestyle brands. Especially for a product where, through our orchestration, we could draw attention to an entire category or shop within a store rather than just having individual merchandising fixtures, each with its own message. The adoption barrier that I've encountered when I've talked to brands about this, what you were just describing is they like it, but they only need it for six weeks or four weeks or some defined campaign term, and even though they may be a big CPG brand with all kinds of products they're so siloed that you couldn't just say, “This shampoo digital fixture could be a body lotion fixture for round two, and you could share it across different ones.” They'd say, “Yeah, but that would never happen.”  Jay Leedy: Yeah, that was actually the concept of the one that we were working on with Westrock and GlaxoSmithKline. So the idea was that it'd be a seasonal product that was focused on at the time, Flonase and Claritin, and then once the season for allergies was over, they would pivot to another product that was better suited to the next season. That was exactly the concept. I think you're right. There is a seasonality to these activities, but the beauty of digital is that you can effectively reskin these things and repurpose them. So long as you have an intelligent design and the rest of the fixture to accommodate a range of products, and basically send in another kit of graphics and merchandise to correspond with that in partnership with a kit packer like Westrock. You can clarify your role with Sony, which you were there for two or three years, I think. But what I found intriguing now that you're not there is that your gig was basically developing partnerships for Sony to use its smart displays. When you started, there were, I think, one or two, maybe, and by the time you left, I think you were past 80 different partners.  So you had this unique perspective of talking to a whole bunch of CMS software companies about what they had and analyzing whether there was a fit, and I'm just curious, having seen all these different ones and now somewhat detached from them, what your impression? Are they all the same, which is, I think what most people would think?  Jay Leedy: Yeah, I was there for three and a half years, and you're right. When I came on, there was exactly one product that had gone through any kind of formal due diligence or QA, and so my program was really about building out that ecosystem with some formalities and processes, and I was fortunate enough to talk to and onboard roughly 90 different technologies that were, I'd say maybe 70% of those were digital signage and the rest were spread between unified communications or AV over IP as a software-defined solution. We also had a range of telemetry and UCC solutions as well. I think I had exposure to roughly 140 companies or so. On the CMS front, I know Invidus recently did a report that you commented on in your blog as well, and you're not wrong, for the most part, a lot of CMS platforms, at their core, do the same thing. The difference is how they do it. For me, the flexibility in their architecture, as I mentioned earlier, the idea of progressive web apps that decouple some of the real differentiation early in the market, that was an all-in-one solution with device management, has kind of evolved to the point where customers want flexibility and deciding and decoupling that device management from CMS but there's also, I think, the extent to which these companies have invested in APIs and manage those APIs and other data connectors and understand interoperability sets them apart.  I think for me, with Videri and our clear focus on retail and creative agencies and optimizing and enabling workflows that would be API dependent, as well as a cloud-based SaaS that has the flexibility to be able to grow and evolve, in that direction, that was what was appealing for me. It's not to say that Videri was the only one with all those marks ticked in their offering, but as we talked about earlier, had some other organizational considerations that really were the determining factor for me coming over here. Without naming names or anything, did you see companies that were clearly more advanced versus ones that were maybe building on something that they've had for many years, and they're just incrementally bolting new capability onto an existing software stack?  Jay Leedy: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's true for any company in the tech space that, at some point, you have to acknowledge that your technical debt load is too much and completely re-architect the solution. We've seen that happen with a number of companies in our space. There are a number of others that continue to struggle with that technical debt and architecture that just doesn't lend itself to meeting the expectations of the market.  Were you recommending the key things that, whether you're a solutions partner or an end user, they should look for if they want to be future-proofed and really modern?  Jay Leedy: First and foremost, these days, it's an API-first strategy. We need to ensure that There's a robust enough set of APIs to enable baseline telemetry and interoperability with a number of other API-first solutions. I think about, in particular, what's happening with digital transformation in large consultancies like Accenture, EY, and Deloitte. A lot of those hinge on moving from on-premise to cloud-based solutions for a range of business applications.  If anybody listening to this podcast is using Office 365, for example, there are a number of third-party solutions that plug into those, obviously with a fee involved. However, to enable that, you have to have the right architecture, and digital signage isn't that different.  We talk a little bit in this industry about headless and the idea of headless means, I think, escapes some people. I think the idea of no or low code development also, I think, escapes some people, but both of those are similar in that they enable. A much lower cost of entry to get a lot more functionality because the architecture is built in such a way that it can just essentially plug in like a Lego, and you can create building blocks that are predefined, versus having to have a linear development approach that can be really cost intensive. Yeah, I was on a call yesterday, and it was interesting. They were talking very much about that. From my perspective, if you have a solution that has a distinct login and you have to do everything digital signage through that login, with no real hooks into anything else, that's a big challenge, particularly for larger organizations that want to use one tool set.  It's going to push out to whatever the endpoint is and whatever that endpoint is communicating. Jay Leedy: Yeah, and also just thinking about all the different ways content can be generated now. There's been a lot of buzz around generative AI, but the rules for content and distribution largely have been in most of these CMS platforms for a long time. But a means of automating those rules and creating if this, then that scenario or ingesting data that can then drive outcomes and content. that's not necessarily core to a lot of those platforms, or leveraging API calls directly from digital asset management tools and leveraging all of the metadata tagging logic that is built into those, and pulling those directly into the content strategy also necessarily isn't native to a lot of CMS platforms. So I think those are all kinds of key things to consider when making a selection or at least knowing, if it's possible downstream, should your company mature to the point where they want to leverage those types of tools.  If people want to catch up with you and talk about what you're doing with Videri, I know they can find you online, obviously, but you'll be at Infocomm?  Jay Leedy: I will be at Infocomm and the Digital Signage Federation mixer in Tampa in about two weeks. Either way, I'd love to see you and continue the conversation.  All right, Jay. It's great to catch up.  Jay Leedy: Great to see you as well, Dave.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I have invested a lot of time in the last six or seven years trying to educate myself on LED display technology and terminology, but sometimes it feels like I have mountain to climb and I am still at base camp looking for my oxygen bottle stash. Manufacturers and their marketers keep coming up with new terms and acronyms, and they often play pretty fast and loose with their descriptions and assertions. Exhibit A are all the companies who are marketing microLED products that aren't microLED, and Exhibit B is the crowd of Chinese manufacturers saying they have Naked Eye 3D LED displays, when all of those visual illusions seen on displays lately are the result of clever creative and have nothing to do with the display technology. So I have a lot of time for a UK company called LED Studio, which has made the conscious decision to educate its customers and broader market, instead of blinding that market with piles of specs and marketing  terms that few people understand. The company has resources on its website that explain the technology and clear some of the technical fog, and people who know their stuff, speak openly, and aren't in perpetual Always be Closing sales mode. I had a great chat about LED technology terms, what's going on in the industry, and what really matters. My guests are Larry Zoll, who runs US operations, and Ross Noonan, the UK-based Technical Sales & Marketing Manager and the guy leading the education effort. The accents will give away who is who. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Larry and Ross, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a quick introduction of who you are and what LED Studio does?  Larry Zoll: I'm Larry Zoll, the president of the LED Studio's operations.  Ross Noonan: I'm Ross Noonan, the technical sales and marketing manager for the LED Studio. Larry Zoll: We are a UK-based LED display manufacturer with a growing presence worldwide.  So just for clarity, Ross is over in the UK, and Larry is in the United States right now, so they can't look at each other and go, now you talk or whatever.  So, I've known you guys for a while. I've been to your little demo center in London, and I know LED Studio is based in the West of London. I had a good chat with Ross at ISE, and one of the things that really struck home for me was that there was a company that was actually trying to educate the market on more than just their product. You know, Ross, in particular, was trying to clear the fog through blogging and videos and everything else, explaining to people what this is all about because it's a very confusing little space, is it not?  Larry Zoll: It's a very confusing space. I mean, Dave, you and I have known each other for a long time. I've always been very focused on technology and the education of technology and making sure that people understand what's really out there because it's so confusing.  You know, a big part of our initiatives is making sure that we're able to educate the market and simplify what's out there because for a long time, this has been an alphabet soup of different options and different availability, and really more often than not tends to be more confusing than it needs to be. One of our goals specifically is to help demystify that and help people understand what they need and, almost more importantly, what they don't need to implement successfully an exciting project.  Is it confusing because I'm stupid or… Well, don't answer that! Or is it just that marketers are trying to outdo each other, so they come up with acronyms and push aspects of their products that maybe don't matter all that much but make them sound special?  Larry Zoll: I'll let the marketer answer that question. Then, I'll give you my perspective.  Ross Noonan: I think you're definitely not stupid. I think we've got people who have been in LED for a long time, and they even have to get into the nitty-gritty as to why they're offering a product for a particular application. You know, it is not like any other kind of technology. It doesn't just come out of a box. I know that some brands are going down the all-in-one route, and that's fantastic. It opens up big screens to off-the-shelf items. Still, it's a very small part of the market, and as soon as you move away from that, there are so many different ways to do something with an LED display. There are so many different applications that basically mean that the specs are ripped up and started again. I think I mentioned this on a blog previously. You know, a consultant came to me and said, why can't you just give me a data sheet? And the reason sometimes is that, well, because you've asked for a particular thing, we've got to go away and kind of rip that data sheet up and start from scratch. Does it need different receiver cards? Does it need to have a different pixel technology? What is the function that you need? Where do you want to see and how do you want to see it? And then we'll go away and create that and that can be confusing, and it's why you're starting to see the emergence of companies like the LED Studio who are taking the time to try and make sure the customer understands why they're buying something and why they need it or why they don't need it and maybe that's a good point for Larry to jump in a little bit more on the sort of the project management side of things, and delivery.  Larry Zoll: One of the things that keeps me very excited about this industry is that it is very high tech and it does move very fast, and that can create some confusion in what the different technologies are capable of and what they're not capable of and why you should choose one thing over another, especially on the indoor, although the outdoor has started to make some big leaps in technology as well. And I think that allaying that confusion and clarifying that understanding is really the responsibility of the manufacturers, or else it just becomes a mishmash of stuff, and it makes people feel like they're stupid, even though they've been in the industry for as long as anybody else, but it's a lot to stay on top of.  When you're dealing with customers or reseller partners, that sort of thing, are they appreciative of the effort that you're making to kind of explain things as opposed to just kind of blinding them with terms?  Ross Noonan: Absolutely. I mean, we sat down as a business, Larry from a strategic point of view, Rob as the owner, and myself as marketing, and we said right at the start of this two-year journey that we've been on to get the business. In people's minds, we wanted to be thought leaders and try and educate people on the response to that has been nothing but positive. You know, people are starting to come to say now I understand why I need to specify this particular product. Well, now I know the difference between what a COB pixel means for energy consumption versus an SMD because before, I would look for a diagram, and there would be 100 different versions of what an SMD and a COB pixel look like, and now something that I can digest and understand, and that's been really exciting for us, to see people coming back and feeding back positive information, all the way from consultants to end clients. Yeah, when I started really actively following this space, SMD was the primary way that these displays were being built and marketed, and then COB came along, I started hearing terminology like four in one and split chip and it just goes on and on.  Is there a dominant, primary technology that is now being made, marketed and demanded by buyers?  Larry Zoll: I think it really depends on the application like you said, but SMD, I'd still say, is the dominant general technology. But there are now a number of variations on SMD that can change the way that you implement it, whether it's GOB that gives you that protective coating, or maybe it increases contrast. You know, it could be a flip chip that reduces power consumption and increases brightness. You know, there are a number of different common cathodes, right? There are so many different ways that you can vary that one technology. Just saying SMD is the dominant technology is a little misleading, but it's a little understated, I guess.  But I think very quickly, we're also starting to see that for the narrower pitches and for micro LED displays, which we define and hope sort of the industry lands on a definition of anything under a pitch of one millimeter, you're starting to see more and more COB and COB is becoming more prevalent because there's more manufacturing starting to happen with it. It's been a challenge for some suppliers to date because of the difficulty in starting up the manufacturing lines and keeping them going. But that's becoming less of an issue. So that's starting to ramp up.  So what's the core distinction between an SMD surface mounted and chip on board or COB?  Ross Noonan: The main thing is that with surface mount diodes, it says exactly how it is. You've got a pixel in a package, which is then mounted onto the PCB. There are a number of components that make up that package.  I guess the biggest difference between the two is that with COB, you're effectively mounting the diodes directly onto the substrate. So you're removing that little building block that mounts onto the PCB. The biggest benefit of that is obviously a reduction in componentry. That means a reduction in resistance, which then has a knock-on effect on heat output so the screen is generally more energy efficient.  When you add a common cathode and flip chip to the COB array, you're starting to remove things like copper bonding wires and all of the other little bits and pieces that add to resistance. I think we worked out that on, a 1080p SMD display, there were millions and millions of bonding wires.  Larry Zoll: I think we said 20 million in an HD display, and they will add resistance. Whether they're copper or gold or whatever, they add a lot of components and physical electric resistance. One of the things that I sort of lean on when I'm talking to customers about this is that when you're powering up a display, the electricity has to go one of two places. It's either heat or light and obviously, you want as much of that to convert to light as possible because that's how you make the display more efficient. So the hotter the display is, the less efficient your display is at creating light. So, really, what it comes down to is that by eliminating a lot of those components, COB becomes a much more efficient technology in creating light, which is good for everybody.   I assume it also removes points of failure and does it remove cost as well? Larry Zoll: To be honest with you, that depends on who you're working with. I mean, a few minutes ago, I mentioned that there is a large cost associated with starting up and shutting down the manufacturing lines for COB. It takes a substantial amount of time and effort, and if it's not something that you have dedicated space for in the manufacturing process, then it's going to impact the price. Suppose you have dedicated manufacturing resources to COB, where you're not switching lines and switching manufacturing processes frequently. In that case, it does have the potential to save you money on COB, even over SMDs.  Ross Noonan: Yeah, and I guess one thing that we did as a business sort of a year ago was sit down and look at that fine pitch trend, which Larry mentioned. The long-term trend suggests that COB is going to be the dominant. Potential technology in fine pitch was that we needed to start offering COB at a price that was attractive to people who were potentially considering SMD versus COB. You know, in the past they were vastly different in price so we needed to ramp up our production line to be able to bring that price more in line with one another and make that decision easy. When you start to add things like COB comes with a protective resin as standard as part of the pixel encapsulation process whereas with SMD, that's an additional cost through GOB resin, all of a sudden the ROI starts to really stack up for the client. They're really starting to see the benefits of that. Not only am I getting a more energy-efficient display, and in a lot of cases, maybe a better one in terms of image quality, but also my pixels are better protected against outside forces, accidental damage, lumps and bumps and things like that. So that's a huge benefit that COB has as part of its standard offering that clients are really starting to see the benefit from. How protective is the GOB or the coating inherent with COB?  I asked because TSI Touch, a company in Pennsylvania that has started marketing an acrylic shield that you would put in front of a display. They showed somebody throwing a basketball at this shield, and I've always thought the GOB and the coding are terrific in that they're going to offer some degree of protection, but they have their limits. Correct?  Larry Zoll: Of course, it has its limits. I love the guys at TSI Touch. I've done a lot of work with them over the years. I don't know if putting a shield in front of the display, if you have a GOB is necessary. I mean, we have one customer we work with that has a lot of family activities around them where kids can easily reach the displays and we've got with this one client, we've got over 15,000 modules deployed, and over the past two years, they're all GOB and over the past two years, we've seen 20 of those 15,000 returned for service, which is like a 0.02 service rate, something like that.  So, I think in reasonable settings, you know, I wouldn't go and hit it with a baseball bat but it is certainly well enough protected for most general settings.  Yeah, I tend to agree, but I do wonder if in public concourses in places like arenas and so on, a GOB display may be fine for people coming and going from a Taylor Swift concert. But maybe not for a Norwegian death metal concert. Different demographics?  Larry Zoll: It's a fair assumption. That's a great question, though. I think everybody would really benefit if we could put together some metrics on what that protection really looks like. One of the things that struck me walking around ISE was looking at all these gorgeous displays that were all COB or other technologies like that, in various stands, some very high profile, some you had to find kind of if you walk more towards the back of some of the exhibit halls and I started concluding, maybe right or wrong, that I don't know that the industry really needs to get to micro LED or displays that are called micro LED, because the fine pitch, sub one millimeter, more “conventional” and all displays look absolutely fantastic. So are you benefiting that much more from the additional cost of going to micro LED?  Ross Noonan: That's a very good question because, obviously, as humans, we're always in the pursuit of improvement. You know, technology was about driving the next best thing. You know, it was 1080p, then it was 4K, then it was 8K. There comes a point where this is, of course, my opinion, I think many people who have been in this industry and done what I've done would share that there's going to come a point where having a smaller pixel pitch really doesn't make that much difference.  I mean, how often are you going to go and stand less than a meter from a screen, especially if it's a big one? That's just not really what's intended for there. There are obviously some cases where maybe an immersive and interactive where you want people interacting with large format displays that perhaps a sub 1mm pixel pitch might make sense, but generally speaking, Larry and I spoke about this before the call. There are some 2.5mm is a fantastic pixel pitch for a lot of applications. 1.5mm is also fantastic. That's why many of those big screens at the show were kind of 1.25 or 1.5mm.  When you start to get lower than that, it becomes extremely subjective as to whether it is worth that extra $200-400 that adds for not an awful lot of benefit? I'm sure Larry's got more to add, but yeah, I think you're right. I think that chasing that pitch may be similar to what Larry mentioned earlier, which is cameras, and I'm sure he's going to use that analogy in a minute, which makes complete sense.  Larry Zoll: I think one thing that a lot of people don't realize is that when you move from a 1.2mm pitch product to a 0.9mm pitch product, you're doubling the number of pixels in that display. I don't care who you are; that is going to add a substantial amount to the cost of that display, and whether you're getting the benefit of that double the number of pixels is really a subjective question. Yes, there are going to be applications where you're going to want something super tight, right? If you are trying to replace interactive LCD, right? In that case, you're going to want something that is tight because you're going to be within that arm's length, right?  But if you're talking about a conference room, a lobby, or something similar, there are plenty of arguments to keep things a little bit wider, with no discernible detriment to the project whatsoever and Ross mentioned the cameras; I feel like we're at a point in this industry where digital cameras were 5-7 years ago where everybody was racing towards a number of megapixels, and at some point the industry, consumers in the industry realized that 20 or 40 megapixels in an everyday situation wasn't really going to make a difference and most of the major camera manufacturers could hit a reasonable number of megapixels. So that industry moved towards, well, what were the other differentiating factors? You know, is it sensor size? Is it HDR? Is it whatever? And that's where you're starting to see, especially in professional cameras, since the industry sort of forking is on those differentiators, and I think we're moving in a very similar space in the LED market.  You know, most of the manufacturers out there now can hit a reasonable pixel pitch and do a good job doing it. So what differentiates Manufacturer A from manufacturer B is how you're doing it. Is it the components? Is it the epoxy that you're using for the GOB? Is it the lifetime performance of the display? Those are the start to think. Those are the things you need to start to look at in order to really differentiate the quality of what's out there. With micro LED, one of the arguments I've heard from a company that's actually in that business is yes, right now it's still early days, but over time, because of the way micro LED is envisioned to be manufactured, when the yields get up there that they reduce the number of manufacturing flaws, you can hugely reduce the manufacturing cost per square foot of LED by using mass transfer and effectively, I guess, kind of printing these displays.  Larry Zoll: Yeah, and that's one of the things I was referencing earlier about the cost associated with starting up and shutting down a COB manufacturing line. That's where a lot of those error rates and everything else come from. So yes, I agree. If you can keep those manufacturing lines constant, then it does have substantial impacts on that part of the process and gives you the ability to lower your prices because your failure rates are so much lower, and I think you're right, the mass transfer is the next big. The next big, I don't know, golden egg, and we're seeing that now with a few small manufacturers who are coming out with, they're called MIP displays, micro LED in the package, and MIP displays take advantage of that mass transfer process, and just, very briefly, very high level.  You know, traditional SMD COB displays, and even DIP displays are done using pick-in-place, where you have a machine that literally picks a component off of a real place on the PCB, and it gets soldered in place very fast. I've seen those machines. Yeah, it's still one piece at a time. The big draw for MIP displays at the moment is that they can take advantage of this mass transfer process, where you're basically taking a piece of film that has X many diodes. It gets placed onto the substrate that way, and there are advantages to it. Still, I think eventually, with the micro LED displays, we're working towards that process there too, but that's going to take some time, and that's where I think a lot of the industry will eventually move.  Setting aside really specialized applications like medical imaging, what pixel pitch is pretty much enough? I mean, I walked around ISC and saw AOTO marketing a sub-five millimeter pixel pitch, and I thought, well, that's interesting, but who on earth needs that?  Ross Noonan: Yes, that's a very good question. You mentioned the screen on Langstand, and I think that was one of the main focal points because it was a fantastic screen with fantastic content. From memory, it was a 1.25mm. I don't think it was lower than one mil. I think it was 0.9mm.  Ross Noonan: Oh, was it 0.9mm?  Yeah, I think so.  Ross Noonan: I think there's an element that's something to be said there that the awe and wonder that screen caused is whether we are going to get much more amazement from a screen that then is twice the resolution. I just don't know how the costs and benefits stack up. The human eye can only perceive so much detail.  We haven't even gotten into talking about the content creation costs and keeping that screen refreshed. You know, that's a high ongoing cost that many clients are not necessarily educated about, especially when we're dealing with clients who are now looking at 8k resolution screens, and they've got the budget for it; you have to have that conversation with them. We'll also have you get the budget and that content refreshed and then keep that content playing. It's not a cheap thing to do, and you're chasing a resolution that perhaps you just don't need. It's always a good conversation to have with clients. It's what you want versus what you need. They're two different things, and sometimes we compromise with them, and sometimes we actually help educate them and help them pick the right thing. I mean, there's a reason why 1.5mm seems to be the fastest-growing pixel pitch of choice at the moment anyway, and I think that 1.2mm to 1.8mm is where we're going to see the most increase and longevity of pixel pitch sales. That's just based on the 7 to 8 years that I've been doing LED and seeing it ramping up and remaining or keep doing so.  Larry Zoll: I think that comes down, Dave, to the education that you were talking about previously, too. I recently went to a meeting where a customer was saying they're putting this huge project together, and they're saying, “We absolutely have to do this with 0.6mm displays. There's no way we can't.” We took them and showed them a 1.2mm COB, and they were absolutely blown away.  Part of it is the education piece of it, right? I think a lot of people say they need to have the newest and the highest, the best, because it's the newest and the highest, the best without really knowing what the potential is for what may already exist and doing that education and exposing the market to what is possible and showing them what the range is, really can help people make very well informed decisions without having to as tight as possible.  Another interesting thing I was struck by ISC was with one manufacturer, a fairly substantial one, walking around their stand and looking at the displays and realizing they're not even showing the pixel pitch, like, usually particularly the Chinese manufacturers, they'll say it's this and that, and it's 1.4 or whatever it is. But they didn't even have those little signs that called that out, and that struck me as, okay, we're kind of getting beyond this pixel pitch rate race, at least for some of the people. Ross Noonan: Yeah, it's an interesting perspective. From a marketing perspective, it's a great idea. Let the screen and the content do the talking, and then people will come and say to you, “Wow, that screen is fantastic. Give me some details,” and you say it's at 1.8 mil.  It's going to, as Larry said, that's a great way of showing people that sometimes resolution isn't always the main thing. It's all about optimization and really good content.  Larry Zoll: The install quality is a big part of that too, but I think you're right. I think you can potentially lean on that, and my guess is that if you had people coming up to your booth asking about the pitch of the display, it's typically not going to be as tight of a pitch as they think it is. What really genuinely matters, if I'm someone who's relatively new to this as an integrator or an end user, they can be all caught up on the terminology that goes, I need a micro LED display, or as you've said, they need a 0.6mm, that's the only thing that's going to work, that sort of thing. What actually does matter?  Ross Noonan: What do you want to see, and where do you want to see it from? Yeah, it sounds simple, but that really is how you want to see it or how you want to interact with it? It's probably the next set of questions. I'll let Larry delve into it more, but that is how we always start a conversation. What is it you want to see? Where do you want to see it from? And then let's explore the options that are going to deliver that, in the best way possible.  Larry Zoll: My background was in design before I joined LED Studio and the manufacturing side. I was a designer. I spent a long time in the consulting world. I still firmly believe that technology can't drive the design. You have to let the story drive the tech, and that's how we approach every project. I also think that, as Ross said earlier, there are more and more companies out there doing all-in-ones, and we do them too. There are great applications for all-in-one displays, but just as frequently, if not more frequently, this industry is still as much art as it is science, and what that translates into from a project requirement standpoint really depends on the ultimate goals for the project. I've said to people when they've asked me that kind of question, I'm nowhere near as deep as you guys are on the LED side, but I've said what can really matter is quality of support and responsiveness of support and having more than just salespeople in the same country as you, but, in this discussion, you've mentioned a lot of things about what components are used, how it's made, how the heat gets out, all these sorts of things that are much more technical and in the weeds, but maybe are things that people are looking for if they're really trying to make good, informed decisions, they have to get beyond how pretty it looks on the trade show floor and find out how it works and how it's going to last.  Larry Zoll: No, that's absolutely right. I mean, we haven't even delved into the support part of it, but that's a huge component of it too. I mean, there's so much out there and many different ways to buy products. I think people frequently underestimate the need for a good partner in these projects. They're living, breathing things; whether it's content refreshes or content management systems, they're ultimately all computers, right? Computers will do what computers will do. So you have to have a good partner who can support you throughout its life.  At a very basic level, everybody who's involved in technology knows this: Yes, you can buy stuff really inexpensively from China, but whether it's computers or media players or other devices, you genuinely are for the lower cost of getting what you paid for. Larry Zoll: Yeah, a hundred percent.  Ross Noonan: Yeah, and I guess the support side of things is important too, for the fact that, as Larry touched upon, we know these project products are potentially quite complex. I mean, obviously, we've simplified a lot of them in terms of how they are installed, but sometimes you can't move away from the fact that you might need structural engineering; it's not just something that you slap at the end of the project. It's got to be project managed with architects and electricians and all these different trades. It all has to come together, perhaps to a grand opening of a large event, and so what we are finding is some of the bigger manufacturers, they don't want that headache of having the responsibility to do that level of support, which you could claim is quite granular, having to really get involved in the weeds and making sure that you're thinking of every potential outcome and then delivering that on-site and that leaves the door wide open to the smaller manufacturers like us who have built up a group of individuals who've been sort of working at the front end of LED displays. It means we can go in and offer a service that is perhaps a bit more personal, and of course, there are always problems with these projects. That's what technology is all about solving problems.  But we like to think that we're quite proactive at solving those plans and innovative in how we solve problems with our technologies to make things easier, and that's something that we pride ourselves on. All right. I said before we even started that this was going to fly by and it certainly did. I think we'll have to do this again because I don't think we really covered the waterfront. We just started our little walking discussion here. But I appreciate your time.  Larry Zoll: Thanks so much, Dave. Ross Noonan: Thank you.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When the pandemic hit and a lot of people started working from home, many digital signage CMS software companies started developing and releasing solutions that pushed the digital signage messaging more normally posted on screens around workplaces to the laptop and computer monitor screens in the formal or ad hoc workspaces created around houses and apartments. It was a new but necessary feature for most companies, but something the Dutch company Netpresenter has been doing for almost 30 years. The software company started out with that problem in mind, borrowing on the concept of screensavers to create what it calls desktop digital signage. Over time, it added more conventional digital signage capabilities for workplaces - a solution that founder Frank Hoen says is not an add-on, but as robust as the many, many, many other CMS options out there. Along with offering a lot of integrations with business systems like SharePoint, the Netpresenter platform is very deep when it comes to triggered alerts for things like emergencies. That was developed in the wake of 9/11, when Netpresenter's US office in the World Trade Center complex was lost in the terror attack. Netpresenter has more than 5 million active users globally, from SMB to huge multi-nationals and government agencies that see screens on desktops and walls as the most effective way to reach and update its workers. While most of that footprint is desktop digital signage, Hoen says at least five percent of Netpresenter's software licenses are being used for conventional digital signage in workplaces. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Frank, thank you for joining me. I have been aware of Netpresenter for the longest time, but we've never actually chatted, and it's interesting that you're one of the oldest companies out there but not terribly well known. Frank Hoen: We're all over the United States. We have hospitals like George Washington Memorial Hospital and big hospital chains across the US, for example, oil refineries in the Middle East, and military installations. There is just a lot of oil, a lot of industries, and a lot of offices across the globe that use our software, and it's been a while, so we have a couple of very interesting customers.  One of the very earliest ones was the US Space Command, I believe, in 1995. Can you imagine that? Those were the days of PointCast, and everybody was saying it was the next big thing.  I remember PointCast.  Frank Hoen: Which was a dragon of a piece of software. It was terrible.  Sucked all the bandwidth!  Frank Hoen: Yeah, and it is interesting because, actually, the beginnings of Netpresenter could be traced back to the fact that we were selling one of the big brands of signage out there. I can tell you it was a Scala, Commodore Amiga, which was expensive as hell. They tried to bridge TV to the PC, and well, you know, they weren't that successful. Windows was not very multimedia-oriented then, and it didn't go that well, in the beginning, at least.  We saw that, and we didn't want to build a signage solution or compete with them, but what we did see is that for the first time, all these computers out there with screens, which were managed, which were there, were available, and they were interconnected, and so you start to experiment. You put some images and videos on the server, and then the server comes down because of all the bandwidth. So we introduced some smart caching, and voila, Netpresenter was born.  It was kind of an interesting beginning, but big companies like Nokia, Sony, and the early pioneers picked up on it, and one of our early customers was actually a US Space Command. And so I literally started going to the trade show. I came across a Marine who was in this battle group who used Netpresenter, and I never heard of the people. I didn't know they were using it. They might have copied it from one Navy server to other ships, but what can you do? It's a nice story now.  So you have interesting roots in that since COVID became a thing, the pandemic bubbled up, and a lot of people were working from home. A lot of “conventional” or “mainstream” digital signage companies branched into making effective screensavers, pushing information to desktops for work-from-home people. You, on the flip side, started as a corporate screensaver company that then evolved and expanded into doing digital signage as well, correct?  Frank Hoen: Well, yes, and if I may add, and taking it a bit back from COVID, we had an office in Twin Towers, and when obviously that happened, and all the people who I knew had died, we were like, could we have actually maybe contributed in a positive way and then trying to prevent when something similar happens to be able to save more people? And that was the beginning of what we call our Emergency Alert Capability of Netpresenter.  So, sir, you had an office in the World Trade Center? Frank Hoen: Yes. Wow.  Frank Hoen: So, that was one of those pivotal moments. Obviously, COVID was as well, and I'll get back to that. But, imagine this, there, and suddenly boom, and it was, yeah, obviously terrible. But it was for us. We were like, let's introduce emergency alerts in our platform so that our customers can actually use this for emergency evacuations, fire, aiding and fire alerts, giving specific information, active shooter, tornado warnings, and the software has been with us since then, basically, and to this day, many us hospitals actually use our software for that specifically as well, for example.  Still, we have whole countries that are actually running the Netpresenter software, including the screens, all these tools, apps, and push notifications. This is a full omnichannel emergency alert system capable of serving whole countries. They're running software. So if people are buying, and that's my point, if people are buying Netpresenter, they're buying something that literally whole countries depend on to address millions and millions immediately. So, we have seen quite a few copycats over the years, and I always felt, and so our developers, they had a very high shareware component in there. It was kind of like hack on the hack. Obviously, then those, what we have very often seen is people start off with that because they have rock bottom prices, obviously, because they can't compete on features. Still, eventually, those customers end up at us.  If you need to run on corporate devices, mobile devices, PCs, and all these things and networks. The last thing you want is for that piece of software to be installed, which kills your bandwidth and causes all kinds of problems. There are big organizations, especially in hospitals and other places, that they choose for quality, and that means. You know, we're not the cheapest solution out there, most expensive either, but we've had many customers for 20-plus years. What IT company can say that?  Not a lot. So, when you're asked to describe your company, do you say you're a digital signage software company or something else? Frank Hoen: We're into corporate communications. Basically, this is a corporate communication platform. We do say that we have signage for the big screens, desktop digital signage for all existing PCs, app solutions, alerts, notifications, tickers, and all kinds of tools, basically any device in the organization. I always use the parallel of a hospital. There are big screens hanging there. We provide those; we run on those. There's all the PCs, we run on those. We run on the tablets. We run on mobile devices. There's the alert notification as well. The whole thing integrates with things already available. In organizations such as SharePoint integrations, that's not many organizations that offer that. So basically, organizations invest a lot in their intranets in their SharePoints and similar intranets, but predominantly SharePoint if organizations have Windows, but very few people are seeing the content. So that's problematic. There's a saying it's difficult to be famous if nobody recognizes you, and it's essentially here we are, they have invested a lot of money in that. So obviously, things like signage solutions, big screens, and being able to distill headlines literally, need-to-know, must-know information from intranets, that's a killer app that really is bringing the most elegant way and big heritage of push that's bringing content, throughout organizations, fully automated, and that's just beautiful because number one: organizations, they are popularizing the internet, but number two: they're the headlines of what organizations should know, everybody sees them, and that's just very cool. Your website says you have about 5 million active users. I assume a pretty high percentage of that is desktop digital signage, as you describe it. What percentage would you attribute to the larger screens sprinkled around an office building?  Frank Hoen: Well, it's actually relatively high—I would say somewhere between 5% and 10%—and it's significant. So you got a pretty big footprint out there.  Frank Hoen: Yeah, and the interesting thing is that we have customers who pay per annum or per month. The rule is, if it ain't broken, don't fix it. So if customers are happy and you keep adding relevant new features, they stay.  Well, if you've had customers for 20 years, that's a pretty good endorsement. Frank Hoen: Yeah, and that actually brings in the fact that IT revolutions come and go, and listening very carefully to your customers and then working from there, for example, integrating AI, obviously is omnipresent. That is crucial if you want to survive as an organization, whether you're in the signage or not. So I'm working for an organization that's using Netpresenter. I'm, let's say, working remotely. How does your product manifest itself on screens?  Frank Hoen: We use a couple of concepts. Basically, we don't want to be intrusive, so we do have pop-ups. However, I don't like the concept of pop-ups and things like that unless it's in your best interest that you should be immediately notified about something. So we have that, but that's not a mainstream tool.  The mainstream tool is the desktop app, and we have an app that is for mobile devices that's basically an elegant reader where you can command, and things like that, kind of a smart social internet dish, and that can actually is typically often connected with a SharePoint. So it gets automated feeds, but the key component is actually, the home is the desktop signage, desktop digital signage. That is the good old screensaver. Obviously, screens don't burn in anymore, but the elegance of these new flat screens is basically that the difference between sleep mode and active mode isn't that big.  Imagine walking through an organization, and every screen, every of those PCs displays the latest information and the latest headlines from your intranet automatically. You get so many impressions of the message. Then we actually measured that you can actually increase intranet, free fault, but more importantly, the retention to two and a half. So literally, a well-used intranet introduced Netpresenter, and a lot more people recall the key messages, and that's just beautiful. It elegantly brings without interrupting people in the core processes. We obviously want to give management from organizations a fighting chance of reaching their staff.  So if I'm banging away on emails and there's some sort of message that Corporate needs to get out to its staff, what's going to happen on my screen?  Frank Hoen: We have different levels of notifications. So you have a low, medium, and high level of notifications, and we can literally take over your whole screen if necessary. Think active shooters and things like that We call it an emergency alert, similar to the public emergency broadcast. You get lower levels than that. You have partial screens; you have pop-up notifications. We can do things on your mobile device as well. If you're constantly hammering on your PC, the screens won't disappear. So there are all kinds of forms, and basically, remember old McLuhan, “the medium is the message.”  If you have a big toolbox, you don't only have the hammer, if you know what I mean. So you have a lot more tools available at home, but the key tool is still the screensaver.  I'm going to assume having done this for so many years that you have a pretty good sense of the balance that you have to strike. You mentioned the word intrusive before. You can cross that line, I suspect, pretty easily and just start annoying your staff as opposed to educating them and making them aware.  Frank Hoen: You know, obviously, we both agree that people don't consider a signage screen intrusive. It's just there. It's the same with a screensaver; it's there when you're not actively hammering away at emails. You know, you grab a cup of coffee, take a rest break, and turn to the computer, you will see it several times a day, but it never is intrusive because, you know, it's there with your lock screen as well and we have solutions for that as well. So, basically, when you're returning to your computer or not using it for a couple of minutes, we're there on whatever screen that is out there. And are those configurable at the user end, or is that something that's set centrally?  Frank Hoen: The user has some capabilities, but most of them, obviously, you want to ensure that you have some control over internal communications. For example, the screens that won't appear when you're doing a presentation or having a team meeting wouldn't make much sense so you do have control over that, but the organization can determine which tools they use or which mixture of tools they're going to use.  I assume there's a percentage of people who don't want to be bothered and would be looking for ways to disable the application. How do you fight that?  Frank Hoen: That is easily done, of course, through configuring your PC. If it's an office PC, it's easy to do, but you know, I should state that it's ridiculous the amount of time people at work spend on their social media. It's getting crazy, and it's literally two hours or more at work. And it's just not being able as an organization actually to have access, even simple access, to your staff. That's what we're talking about. So we're giving them back a little fighting chance. We're never going to be able to compete one-on-one against social media and all their algorithms and elegant persuasion mechanisms but with Netpresenter, you have a fighting chance of getting your need-to-know information, your must-know information well, between the years of employees, basically.  How do they know it's that much time on social media? Is that IT department just looking at browser activity?  Frank Hoen: Oh, no, these are studies. That's easily googled. There are several big studies out there, and it's what I see here is from Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2023. It basically says that employees are disengaging. They want more recognition for their work, more communication from the leaders, more communication from the leaders, clear goals, stronger guidance, and engagement or culture. How do you do that when working at home? So, how do you actually get culture across while working predominantly at home? Many employees experience stress often because of social media. They already overworked well before entering the office, so basically, there are a lot of studies out there. If you want to have the chance to keep connecting with your employees, your communication platform needs to be adapted to that so that you don't add to the information overload but basically bring some peace and quiet.  But if you cannot reach your staff while working at home, you will lose out. There will be no connection at all at your organization.  How much of this is integrated into other business systems? You mentioned SharePoint before, but you know, companies use Slack and so on.  Frank Hoen: Yeah. We also have Teams connections, for example, and several other connections. Basically, if you have the data, we'll be able to intelligently deliver it to the screens.  We're even able to analyze how much of that was read and understood through AI, through smart AI solutions. So imagine letting AI summarize the key headlines your staff or your management wants employees to know. AI literally analyzes it, compacts it, makes an abstract out of it, puts it out to the screens, and then actually keeps an eye on it, does small polls, two—or three-question polls, and checks whether they have understood it.  So basically, we're seeing now the move from isolated tools or very smart apps into integrated systems, which are basically working like the director of a big news broadcaster. When information comes in, they determine: is it breaking news? Is it news for the app? Is it news on TV? Is it news just for a website? Is it no news? So you have our AI analyzing information, then deciding whether it will be how important it is, putting it out there on the right spot and on the right medium, but also, and that's really new, it can actually detect among these thousands of employees, we actually typically see that on big signage screens or on the screen savers. It can actually detect if they understood it, if they know the basics of, for example, cybersecurity awareness or compliance, and that's really cool. Basically we're bringing signage into massive learning systems without being intrusive, and to elegantly pull, if they know it, not everyone, just a couple and just enough, so, you know, okay, now we need to snooze this campaign that now we need to snooze this campaign or now we need to upscale the campaign and show it more on screens more frequently or maybe even on other channels as well.  So that's awareness. Can you do training?  Frank Hoen: Well, you know, it's not full-blown training in that you're sitting and having your course on C programming. No, it doesn't do that.  This is meant for relatively small pieces of information, not whole ISO manuals or full compliance manuals. Still, the essence of the things the organization has identified is that nobody knows but they should. So, you need to know that those crucial pieces of information are crucial; you can put that in there. It can actually detect if the employees have read it, if they understood it, and it then can report back to management and say, “Hey, you know, did you know that your organization was 85% aware of the basic rules of cybersecurity awareness? It has gone down to 65%. As an AI, upon your instruction, I've decided to show more messages and cybersecurity awareness, and I'm happy to report that after two weeks, 95% of everybody knows cybersecurity awareness.”  So yeah, it's basically bringing signage into the big world where because of all these PCs out there, added real estate screen, real estate is literally football fields more than the screens you have typically hanging out there if you're only using big screens.  Right, and the screens themselves are physically bigger. As I'm chatting with you, I forgot the size of this curved screen thing I have here, but I could have a screensaver on one side and have a big desktop going anyway.  Frank Hoen: Exactly, and basically, you can imagine how big of a screen it is while you are hammering away on emails, but while you're still working in the office or environment, you literally can see the screens to the corners of your eyes or colleagues, or when you walk through the canteen, it's basically, it's everywhere. Your messages are omnipresent because you literally use every screen in your organization.  So if I'm using this solution, is it a license that I buy, do I subscribe, or is it a bit of both?  Frank Hoen: We have on-premise customers that's our current form, and that's preferred by, for example, defense and some of the large organizations, but we also have a new cloud platform, and that's license-based, so we have all variations of licensing.  I assume the cloud side is pretty much essential for the work-from-home crowd. Frank Hoen: Yeah. Although, actually, if they just installed it on their servers, then obviously the organization and the people have access to VPNs, and then it would be available as well. So it's that flexibility, which is really nice because some current customers don't need advanced AI integrations and things like that. However, they still want to be able to convey messages on their PC and rhe desktop digital signage, the alerts, that's all in there, and if they want the more advanced integrations with SharePoint, AI, and learning through signage screens, then they need to move to the Netpresenter Cloud. Workplace has become a very hot vertical in digital signage. What was your reaction during the COVID era when all kinds of digital signage CMS software companies added some variation on corporate screensavers, desktops, and digital signage to their product suite?  Frank Hoen: We saw plenty of them, and most of them were just one of them. “We have those kinds of features-ish” types of companies. There have been no further developments. Some have been limited to an announcement or very basic functionality. It's very easy to hack a browser module, display something on it, and wrap it in there. Still, it's much more difficult to have a full-blown, reliable system that integrates with all back offices and middleware applications. So, basically, it brings back vibes from the shareware days of some competitors. Unless you're committed to developing, keeping it secure, adding new features, making sure it's not an island, it's not something I would advise big organizations to invest in because, basically, it's just a side note for those organizations,  Yeah. When you're talking, I was thinking it's the difference between a company saying, yeah, we can do that versus another company like you're saying, this is what we do.  Frank Hoen: Exactly. It's the same with signage. Everybody can connect a big screen to PowerPoint. That's not signage. That's like the Nike network and USB sticks. That's not signage. Well, I don't consider that signage, and it still is a thing. If organizations would simply calculate the total cost of ownership of the applications, which includes support, which includes messy things with drivers or special PC configurations and things like that, you don't have that when that with Netpresenter, you know, it has for 25 years, it had to run on anything out there, anything, and while being elegant in terms of PC resources and a network resource. With that much experience, no other competitor comes even close there.  Sometimes, when a solution is focused on one thing, the other stuff it does isn't as robust as a pure-play digital signage CMS. How would you answer that? Frank Hoen: We have an extremely robust CMS. Technically, it doesn't matter whether our signage is running on the desktop or big screen. It's even more difficult to run on a computer with dozens of applications open, and then we need to run reliably. Being able to run on those computer environments is so extreme, which means that Netpresenter software needs to be incredibly robust. So, I would argue that in terms of CMS, nobody can teach us lessons there.  Again, whole countries use our software—the original Netpresenter software—and you would use it in your organization. They literally run it too; for example, we had a system a couple of years ago in the Netherlands that was addressing 50,000 public screens and millions of apps, and if you're able to do emergency public broadcast on such a massive scale and reliably run every day on millions of desktop computers abused by users every day, basically, that says something.  Tell me about the company. How big are you?  Frank Hoen: Truth be told, we're a relatively small organization. There was a very deliberate strategy never to go to the stock exchange or attract investor's money, it was never necessary. We kept growing and have been profitable for 25 years in a row. We're very comfortable financially, very secure, and very robust.  But yeah, I have a lot of friends. They did try to go to the stock exchange in the US, and some made it, but most didn't. So there are many organizations we see in our area that are just going bust trying to collect the big check on the stock exchange or investors becoming impatient and are downscaling. It's terrible, and it's killing the industry, and again, what kind of organization would you prefer? Are you entirely self-funded, then?  Frank Hoen: Oh yeah.  So it's your company? Frank Hoen: It's my company.  And how do you sell? Do you go through channel or direct?  Frank Hoen: Both, and there's a big opportunity for any of your listeners in the SharePoint or corporate world to connect with us for free. There's a big opportunity because how are you going to distinguish yourself from all these other internet integrators?  So there's that. So we work through these integrators and there's direct sales as well for, if organizations are of such a scale that it becomes more comfortable to do so. So, last question, what might we see over the next year or so from Netpresenter?  Frank Hoen: Every new technology brings new capabilities, including the omnipresent AI and smart learning through signage, and that is our big focus right now. We want to be able to literally prove to management that through signage on your desktop and on the big screens, you can guarantee that your employees have seen and understood it. That's going to be our year.  Yeah. I mean, that's made a big difference to the digital out of home community, the analytics and proof of view, and so on. So it makes sense that if you're going to make that investment in the enterprise, in the workplace, it'd be great if you actually knew it was working. Frank Hoen: It's not just about counting views. That's not it. Imagine a piece of information comes on and is conveyed on signage, and a small part of the organization receives polls to answer a pop-up, for example, very small, as little as possible, and they're actually being asked if they understood the question. So it's not about counting views. It's much more than that.  Gotcha. All right, Frank, thank you so much for your time.  Frank Hoen: Thank you, Dave. It's been very nice. 

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The health care sector has long struck me as having environments and dynamics that would benefit a lot from using digital signage technology. Accurate information is critically important, and things change quickly and often - in ways that make paper and dry erase marker board solutions seem antiquated and silly. But it is a tough sector to work in and crack - because of the layers of bureaucracy, tight regulations and the simple reality that medical facilities go up over several years, not months. People often talk about the digital signage solution sales cycle being something like 18 months on average. With healthcare, it can be double or triple that. The other challenge is that it is highly specialized and there are well-established companies referred to as patient engagement providers. So any digital signage software or solutions company thinking about going after health care business will be competing with companies that already know the industry and its technologies, like medical records, and have very established ties. LG has been active in the healthcare sector for decades, and sells specific displays and a platform used by patient engagement providers that the electronics giant has as business partners. I had a really insightful chat with Tom Mottlau, LG's director of healthcare sales. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Tom, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what your role is at LG?  Tom Mottlau: I am the Director of Healthcare Sales for LG. I've been in this role for some time now; I joined the company in 1999 and have been selling quite a bit into the patient room for some time.  David: Has most of your focus through those years all been on healthcare? Tom Mottlau: Well, actually, when I started, I was a trainer when we were going through the digital rollout when we were bringing high-definition television into living rooms. My house was actually the beta site for WXIA for a time there until we got our language codes right. But soon after, I moved over to the commercial side and healthcare, around 2001-2002.  David: Oh, wow. So yeah, you've been at it a long time then. Much has changed!  Tom Mottlau: Yes, sir.  David: And I guess in some cases, nothing has changed.  Tom Mottlau: Yep. David: Healthcare is an interesting vertical market for me because it seems so opportune, but I tend to think it's both terrifying and very grinding in that they're quite often very large institutions, sometimes government-associated or university-associated, and very few things happen quickly. Is that a fair assessment?  Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. There's a lot of oversight in the patient room. It's a very litigation-rich environment, and so there's a bit of bureaucracy to cut through to make sure that you're bringing in something that's both safe for patients and protects their privacy but also performs a useful function.  David: I guess the other big challenge is the build-time. You can get word of an opportunity for a medical center that's going up in a particular city, and realistically, it's probably 5-7 years out before it actually opens its doors, right? Tom Mottlau: That's true. Not only that but very often, capital projects go through a gestation period that can be a year or two from the time you actually start talking about the opportunity.  David: And when it comes to patient engagement displays and related displays around the patient care areas, is that something that engineers and architects scheme in early on, or is it something that we start talking about 3-4 years into the design and build process?  Tom Mottlau: Well, the part that's schemed in is often what size displays we're going to need. So, for example, if somebody is looking to deploy maybe a two-screen approach or a large-format approach, that's the type of thing that is discussed early on, but then when they come up on trying to decide between the patient engagement providers in the market, they do their full assessment at that time because things evolve and also needs change in that whole period that may take a couple of years you may go as we did from an environment that absolutely wanted no cameras to an environment that kind of wanted cameras after COVID. You know, so things change. So they're constantly having those discussions.  David: Why switch to wanting cameras because of COVID?  Tom Mottlau: Really, because the hospitals were locked down. You couldn't go in and see your loved one. There was a thought that if we could limit the in-person contact, maybe we could save lives, and so there was a lot of thought around using technology to overcome the challenges of contagion, and so there was even funding dedicated towards it and a number of companies focused on it  David: That's interesting because I wondered whether, in the healthcare sector, business opportunities just flat dried up because the organizations were so focused on dealing with COVID or whether it actually opened up new opportunities or diverted budgets to things that maybe weren't thought about before, like video? Tom Mottlau: True, I mean, the video focus was definitely because of COVID, but then again, you had facilities where all of their outpatient procedures had dried up. So they were strained from a budget standpoint, and so they had to be very picky about where they spent their dollars.  Now the equipment is in the patient room, but at the end of the day, we're still going to get the same flow of patients. People don't choose when to be sick. If it's gonna be either the same or higher because of those with COVID, so they still need to supply those rooms with displays, even though they were going through a crisis, they still had to budget and still had to go through their day-to-day buying of that product.  David: Is this a specialty application and solution as opposed to something that a more generic digital signage, proAV company could offer? My gut tells me that in order to be successful, you really need to know the healthcare environment. You can't just say, we've got these screens, we've got the software, what do you need?  Tom Mottlau: Yeah, that's a very good question. Everything we do on our end is driven by VOC (voice of customer). We partner with the top patient engagement providers in the country. There are a handful that are what we call tier one. We actually provide them with products that they vet out before we go into production.  We go to them to ask them, what do you need? What products do you need for that patient? I mean, and that's where the patient engagement boards, the idea of patient engagement boards came from was we had to provide them a display that met, at the time, 60065 UL, which is now 62368-1, so that they can meet NFPA 99 fire code.  David: I love it when you talk dirty. Tom Mottlau: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff out there that.  David: What the hell is he talking about?  Tom Mottlau: Yeah, I know enough to be dangerous. Basically, what it boils down to is we want to make sure that our products are vetted by a third party. UL is considered a respectable testing agency, and that's why you find most electronics are vetted by them and so they test them in the patient room. It's a high-oxygen environment with folks who are debilitated and life-sustaining equipment so the product has to be tested.  We knew that we had to provide a product for our SIs that would meet those specs as well as other specs that they had like they wanted something that could be POE-powered because it takes an act of Congress to add a 110-amp outlet to a patient room. It's just a lot of bureaucracy for that. So we decided to roll out two units: one of 32, which is POE, and one that's 43. Taking all those things I just mentioned into consideration, as well as things like lighting.  Folks didn't want a big night light so we had to spend a little extra attention on the ambient light sensor and that type of thing. This is our first offering. David: So for doofuses like me who don't spend a lot of time thinking about underwriter lab, certifications, and so on, just about any monitor, well, I assume any monitor that is marketed by credible companies in North America is UL-certified, but these are different grades of UL, I'm guessing?  Tom Mottlau: They are. Going back in the day of CRTs, if you take it all the way back then when you put a product into a room that has a high-powered cathode ray tube and there's oxygen floating around, safety is always of concern. So, going way back, probably driven by product liability and that type of thing. We all wanted to produce a safe product, and that's why we turned to those companies. The way that works is we design a product, we throw it over to them, and they come back and say, okay, this is great, but you got to change this, and this could be anything. And then we go back and forth until we arrive at a product that's safe for that environment, with that low level of oxygen, with everything else into consideration in that room.  David: Is it different when you get out into the hallways and the nursing stations and so on? Do you still need that level, like within a certain proximity of oxygen or other gases, do you need to have that?  Tom Mottlau: It depends on the facility's tolerance because there is no federal law per se, and it could vary based on how they feel about it. I know that Florida tends to be very strict, but as a company, we had to find a place to draw that line, like where can we be safe and provide general products and where can we provide something that specialized?  And that's usually oxygenated patient room is usually the guideline. If there's oxygen in the walls and that type of thing, that's usually the guideline and the use of a pillow speaker. Outside into the hallways, not so much, but it depends on the facility. We just lay out the facts and let them decide. We sell both.  David: Is it a big additional cost to have that additional protection or whatever you want to call it, the engineering aspects?  Tom Mottlau: Yes.  David: So it's not like 10 percent more; it can be quite a bit more? Tom Mottlau: I'm not sure of the percentage, but there's a noticeable amount. Keep in mind it's typically not just achieving those ratings; it's some of the other design aspects that go into it. I mean, the fact that you have pillow speaker circuitry to begin with, there's a cost basis for that. There's a cost basis for maintaining an installer menu of 117+ items. There's a cost basis for maintaining a Pro:Centric webOS platform. You do tend to find it because of those things, not just any one of them, but because of all of them collectively, yeah, the cost is higher. I would also say that the warranties tend to be more encompassing. It's not like you have to drive it down to Ted's TV. Somebody comes and actually remedies on-site. So yeah, all of that carries a cost basis. That's why you're paying for that value.  David: You mentioned that you sell or partner with patient engagement providers. Could you describe what those companies do and offer? Tom Mottlau: Yeah, and there's a number of them. Really, just to be objective, I'll give you some of the tier ones, the ones that have taken our product over the years and tested and provided back, and the ones that have participated in our development summit. I'll touch on that in a moment after this. So companies like Aceso, you have Uniguest who were part of TVR who offers the pCare solutions. You have Get Well, Sonify, those types of companies; they've been at this for years, and as I mentioned, we have a development summit where we, for years, have piled these guys on a plane. The CTOs went off to Korea and the way I describe it is we all come into a room, and I say, we're about to enter Festivus. We want you to tell us all the ways we've disappointed you with our platform, and we sit in that room, we get tomatoes thrown at us, and then we make changes to the platform to accommodate what they need. And then that way, they're confident that they're deploying a product that we've done all we can to improve the functionality of their patient engagement systems. After all, we're a platform provider, which is what we are.  David: When you define patient engagement, what would be the technology mix that you would typically find in a modernized or newly opened patient care area? Tom Mottlau: So that would be going back years ago. I guess it started more with patient education. If Mrs. Jones is having a procedure on her kidney, they want her to be educated on what she can eat or not eat, so they found a way to bring that patient education to the patient room over the TVs. But then they also wanted to confirm she watched it, and then it went on from there.  It's not only the entertainment, but it's also things that help improve workflows, maybe even the filling out of surveys and whatnot on the platform, Being able to order your culinary, just knowing who your doctor is, questions, educational videos, all of those things and then link up with EMR. David: What's that?  Tom Mottlau: Electronic medical records. Over the years, healthcare has wanted to move away from paper, to put it very simply. They didn't want somebody's vitals in different aspects of their health stored on a hand-scribbled note in several different doctor's offices. So there's been an effort to create electronic medical records, and now that has kind of been something that our patient engagement providers have tied into those solutions into the group.  David: So, is the hub, so to speak, the visual hub in a patient care room just a TV, or is there other display technology in there, almost like a status board that tells them who their primary provider is and all the other stuff?  Tom Mottlau: So it started as the smart TV, the Pro:Centric webOS smart TV. But then, as time went on, we kept getting those requests for, say, a vertically mounted solution, where somebody can actually walk in the room, see who their doctor is, see who their nurse is, maybe the physician can come in and understand certain vitals of the patient, and so that's why we developed those patient engagement boards that separately. They started out as non-touch upon request, we went with the consensus, and the consensus was we really need controlled information. We don't want to; we've had enough issues with dry-erase boards. We want something where there's more control in entering that information, and interesting enough, we're now getting the opposite demand. We're getting demand now to incorporate touch on the future models, and that's how things start. As you know, to your point earlier, folks are initially hesitant to breach any type of rules with all the bureaucracy. Now, once they cut through all that and feel comfortable with a start, they're willing to explore more technologies within those rooms. That's why we always start out with one, and then over the years, it evolves.  David: I assume that there's a bit of a battle, but it takes some work to get at least some of the medical care facilities to budget and approve these patient engagement displays or status displays just because there's an additional cost. It's different from the way they've always done things, and it involves integration with, as you said, the EMR records and all that stuff. So, is there a lot of work to talk them into it?  Tom Mottlau: Well, you have to look at us like consultants, where we avoid just talking folks into things. Really, what it has to do with is going back to VOC, voice of the customer, the way we were doing this years ago or just re-upping until these boards were launched was to provide a larger format, and ESIs were dividing up the screen. That was the way we always recommended. But then, once we started getting that VOC, they were coming to us saying, well, we need to get these other displays in the room. You know, certain facilities were saying, Hey, we absolutely need this, and we were saying, well, we don't want to put something that's not rated for that room. Then we realized we had to really start developing a product that suits that app, that environment, and so our job is to make folks aware of what we have and let them decide which path they're going to take because, to be honest, there are two different ways of approaching it. You can use one screen of 75”, divide it, or have two screens like Moffitt did. Moffitt added the patient engagement boards, which is what they wanted.  David: I have the benefit, at least so far, of being kind of at retirement age and spending very little time, thank God, in any kind of patient care facility. Maybe that'll change. Hopefully not.  But when I have, I've still seen dry-erase marker boards at the nursing stations, in rooms, in hallways, and everywhere else. Why is it still like that? Why haven't they cut over? Is it still the prevalent way of doing things, or are you seeing quite a bit of adoption of these technologies? Tom Mottlau: Well, it is, I would say, just because we're very early in all this. That is the prevalent way, no doubt.  It's really those tech-forward, future-forward facilities that are wanting to kind of go beyond that and not only that, there's a lot of facilities that want to bring all that in and, maybe just the nature of that facility is a lot more conservative, and we have to respect that. Because ultimately they're having to maintain it. We wouldn't want to give somebody something that they can't maintain or not have the budget for. I mean, at the end of the day, they're going to come back to us, and whether or not they trust us is going to be based upon whether we advise them correctly or incorrectly. If we advise them incorrectly, they're not going to trust us. They're not going to buy from us ten years from now.  David: For your business partners, the companies that are developing patient engagement solutions, how difficult is it to work with their patient record systems, building ops systems, and so on to make these dynamic displays truly dynamic? Is it a big chore, or is there enough commonality that they can make that happen relatively quickly? Tom Mottlau: That's a very good question, and that's exactly why we're very careful about who's tier one and who we may advise folks to approach. Those companies I mentioned earlier are very skilled at what they do, and so they're taking our product as one piece of an entire system that involves many other components, and I have full faith in their ability to do that because we sit in on those meetings.  Once a year, we hear feedback, we hear positive feedback from facilities. We see it but it really couldn't happen without those partners, I would say. We made that choice years ago to be that platform provider that supports those partners and doesn't compete with them. In hindsight, I think that was a great choice because it provides more options to the market utilizing our platform.  David: Well, and being sector experts in everything that LG tries to touch would be nightmarish. If you're far better off, I suspect I will be with partners who wake up in the morning thinking about that stuff. Tom Mottlau: Yeah. I mean, we know our core competencies. We're never going to bite off more than we can chew. Now granted, we understand more and more these days, there's a lot of development supporting things like telehealth, patient engagement, EMR and whatnot. But we're also going to make sure that at the end of the day, we're tying in the right folks to provide the best solution we can to patients. David: How much discussion has to happen around network security and operating system security?  I mean, if you're running these on smart TVs, they're then running web OS, which is probably to the medical facility's I.T. team or not terribly familiar to them.  Tom Mottlau: Yeah, that's a very good question. Facilities, hospitals, and anything that involves network security bring them an acute case of indigestion, more so than other areas in the business world. So these folks, a lot of times, there's exhaustive paperwork whenever you have something that links up to the internet or something that's going to open up those vulnerabilities. So, Pro:Centric webOS is actually a walled garden. It is not something that is easily hacked when you have a walled garden approach and something that's controlled with a local server. That's why we took that approach. Now, we can offer them a VPN if there is something that they want to do externally, but these systems were decided upon years ago and built with security in mind because we knew we were going to deploy in very sensitive commercial environments. And so not so much a concern. You don't need to pull our TV out and link up with some foreign server as you might with a laptop that you buy that demands updates. It's not anything like that because, of course, that would open us up to vulnerability. So we don't take that approach. It's typically a local server and there is the ability to do some control of the server if you want a VPN, but other than that, there is no access.  David: Do you touch on other areas of what we would know as digital signage within a medical facility?  Like I'm thinking of wayfinding, directories, donor recognition, video walls, and those sorts of things. Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. I mean, we see everything. Wayfinding needs have been for years and years now, and those are only expanding. and we start to see some that require outdoor displays for wave finding. So we do have solutions for that.  Beyond displays, we actually have robots now that we're testing in medical facilities and have had a couple of certifications on some of those. David: What would they do?  Tom Mottlau: Well, the robots would be used primarily to deliver some type of nonsensitive product. I know there's some work down the road, or let's just say there's some demand for medication delivery.  But obviously, LG's approach to any demand like that is to vet it out and make sure we're designing it properly. Then, we can make announcements later on about that type of stuff. For now, we're taking those same robots that we're currently using, say, in the hotel industry, and we're getting demand for that type of technology to be used in a medical facility.  David: So surgical masks or some sort of cleaning solutions or whatever that need to be brought up to a certain area, you could send in orderly, but staffing may be tight and so you get a robot to do it. Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. And that is a very liquid situation. There's a lot of focus and a lot of development. I'm sure there'll be a lot to announce on that front, but it's all very fluid, and it's all finding its way into that environment with our company.  All these future-forward needs, not only with the robots but EV chargers for the vast amount of electric vehicles, we find ourselves involved in discussions on all these fronts with our medical facilities these days.  David: It's interesting. Obviously, AI is going to have a role in all kinds of aspects of medical research and diagnosis and all those super important things.  But I suspect there's probably a role as well, right down at the lobby level of a hospital, where somebody comes in where English isn't their first language, and they need to find the oncology clinic or whatever, and there's no translator available. If you can use AI to guide them, that would be very helpful and powerful.  Tom Mottlau: Let me write that down as a product idea. Actually, AI is something that is discussed in the company, I would say, on a weekly basis, and again, I'm sure there'll be plenty to showcase in the future. But yes, I'd say we have a good head start in that area that we're exploring different use cases in the medical environment.  David: It's interesting. I write about digital signage every day and look at emerging markets, and I've been saying that healthcare seems like a greenfield opportunity for a lot of companies, but based on this conversation, I would say it is, and it isn't because if you are a more generalized digital signage software platform, yes, you could theoretically do a lot of what's required, but there's so much insight and experience and business ties that you really need to compete with these patient engagement providers, and I think it would be awfully tough for just a more generalized company to crack, wouldn't it?  Tom Mottlau: I believe so. I mean, we've seen many come and go. You know, we have certain terms internally, like the medicine show, Wizard of Oz. there's a lot out there; you really just have to vet them out to see who's legit and who isn't, and I'm sure there are some perfectly legitimate companies that we haven't worked with yet, probably in areas outside of patient education we, we have these discussions every week, and it's, it can be difficult because there are companies that you might not have heard of and you're always trying to assess, how valid is this? And, yeah, that's a tough one.  David: Last question. Is there a next big thing that you expect to emerge with patient engagement over the next couple of years, two-three years that you can talk about?  Tom Mottlau: You hit the nail on the head, AI. But you know, keep in mind that's something in relative terms. It has been relatively just the last few years, and it has been something that's come up a lot. It seems there's a five-year span where something is a focus going way back, it was going from analog to digital.  When I first came here, it was going from wood-clad CRT televisions to flat panels, and now we have OLED right in front of us. So yeah, there's, there's a lot of progression in this market. And I would say AI is one of them, and Telehealth is another; I guess we'll find out for sure which one sticks that always happens that way, but we don't ignore them.  David: Yeah, certainly, I think AI is one of those foundational things. It's kind of like networking. It's going to be fundamental. It's not a passing fancy or something that'll be used for five years and then move on to something else. Tom Mottlau: Yeah, true. But then again, also, it's kind of like when everybody was talking about, okay, we're not going to pull RF cable that went on for years and years because they were all going to pull CAT5, and then next thing, you know, they're saying, well, we have to go back and add CAT5 because they got ahead of themselves, right? So I think the challenge for any company is nobody wants to develop the next Betamax. Everybody wants to develop something that's going to be longstanding and useful, and so it's incumbent upon us to vet out those different solutions and actually see real practical ways of using it in the patient room and trusting our partners and watching them grow. A lot of times, they're the test beds, and so that's the benefit of our approach.  By providing that platform and supporting those partners, we get to see which tree is really going to take off.  David: Betamax, you just showed your age.  Tom Mottlau: Yes, sir. That made eight tracks, right?  David: For the kiddies listening, that's VCRs. All right. Thanks, Tom. That was terrific.  Tom Mottlau: Thank you very much, sir.  David: Nice to speak with you. 

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I first spoke with Jonathan Labbee about the grand-scale media facades and displays being produced by SACO Technologies, the Sphere in Las Vegas was just yet another over-the-top  thing rising up from the desert sands. Two years on, and a few months after the giant LED ball was first switched on, the Sphere is probably the most discussed and photographed digital display on the planet. So I was very happy that Labbee was willing to carve out some time to talk about some of the technical details behind the display side of that project, and more broadly what it has meant for the Montreal company, and for the concept of buildings as media facades and visual attractions. In this podcast, we get into some of the technical challenges and innovations associated with putting together both the attention-getting outside exosphere of the building, but also the mind-wobbling 9mm pitch curved display inside. We also talk about the larger business, and the opportunities and challenges of turning big structures into experiential digital displays. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jon, thanks for joining me. It's been a couple of years, but a lot has gone on with your company, and obviously, the big thing is its involvement in the Las Vegas Sphere.  I know we can't spend all of our time talking about that, nor do I want to, but I would imagine your company's work on that has kind of rocked the industry  Jonathan Labbee: It has, and thanks for having me back, Dave. The sphere has been an incredible journey for us. I think two years ago when we last spoke, we were just about to start on our part of the construction, and we successfully delivered that project, which is, I think there were a lot of people and projects that were in the waiting to see if something of this magnitude could be pulled off successfully and now that it has, it has awoken a new level of giant projects around the world. I'm gonna say mostly in the Middle East at this moment in time. Why is that? Is it just about money, or is it also about things like zoning controls and available space? Jonathan Labbee: Well, I mean, obviously, money and budget are always a concern, but I think when you get past the level of installing a giant television on the side of a building and where the building itself is a media medium, but the infrastructure to support that is so significant in your construction budget, I think this is one of the key aspects for these developers and these architects to understand if it could successfully be done.  Now from a zoning perspective, I think that a project like the Sphere is quite revealing in the sense of how much control you have over brightness and the type of and quality of the content and secures the knowledge that a responsible owner can display tasteful content in the environment that it's designed to be in. I know that there was a proposal to do a similar project in the east end of London and that doesn't seem to be going ahead, at least at the moment, and it struck me as one of the barriers to it was simply that you're putting up a very bright object within reasonably close proximity to residential and that's a challenge. Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, it is. I'm not a politician by any means, but I do think there's some politics there and also maybe some fear of new technology that could potentially be disruptive if used irresponsibly. Normally, people who spend this amount of money on a venue tend to have a very secure plan to fit within their environment. So what was done for the Sphere was custom. Could you relate what was done on the outside and then on the inside? The inside is particularly interesting to me because your company's pedigree is not so much on fine-pitch large displays other than for touring acts, which are not as fine a pitch. Jonathan Labbee: Well, yeah, so it's actually pretty interesting that this seems to be our persona; the reality is that most of our development is done on fine-pitch products. We just happen to have been doing quite a bit of low-res or wide-pitch products because we've been doing so many iconic buildings, it seems to be what we're known for.  But if you take, for example, a lot of the touring acts or some of the video screens that we did for Orlando airport, for example, those are 2 millimeters pixel pitch and all these types of things.  So if we go back to the Sphere, the exterior of the sphere, referred to as the exosphere, is made up of these pucks, I would say, that have 48 LEDs, and each one of these pucks is a pixel that is controllable for the client, and that's what gives you that beautiful imagery on the building, and it also has an aesthetic that the architects wanted and the client wanted, where it allows you to see through and see the base building through the exosphere. So, the performance criteria for the exterior was one thing, whereas the performance criteria for the interior were completely different. It needed to be audio transparent because if you go to the Sphere, there are absolutely no speakers or any kind of disruption, and on the media plane, everything is behind the screen. So it gives you a very pure environment.  The screen itself is nominal nine millimeters, but it is 16K x 16 K resolution, and because of the distance, everything just works when you're inside of that environment, you feel like you're wherever the artist or content creator decides that you're going to be. So, if you're on Mars or another part of the planet, you feel like you're there.  For the exosphere, because this had not really ever been done or certainly not done very often, was there an engineering thought process about how we make this work? Will it work? What are the sight lines, all that sort of stuff? Jonathan Labbee: Oh, yes. And as much as I want to take a lot of credit for this, it was definitely a collective effort. First of all, we're dealing with a very sophisticated client that has a lot of knowledge and capabilities, the same goes for the architects and all the other trades that were involved. So we had the opportunity to work with an expanded group of people that had a lot of knowledge and capability to visualize these types of things, and we have done mock up over mock up. So it's not just, oh, let's think about it and build it. It was:  Let's think about it. Let's prototype it. Let's prove it. Let's adapt to it. Let's modify it, and eventually through the process of iteration, you end up with something that is functional for that particular mission.  So, what was the big moment like? I think it was July of last year, or maybe a bit earlier when you first turned it on. Were their fingers crossed, or was it a big aha?  Jonathan Labbee: Well, I can tell you when the client first turned on that exosphere, I think it was like a huge wow moment for everybody, including ourselves, it was spectacular, and then when we had the chance of going to the opening for you to for the interior, which was, the end of September, that, I gotta tell you, was pretty emotional. I don't think that any one of us could have imagined what it would look like in its finished format.  Yeah, because you've done some grand scale indoor stuff for touring acts stadiums, and so on, which are pretty big ass screens, but nothing along these lines, right?  Jonathan Labbee: Nope, there is, actually, nothing on earth and in our industry that exists at this level of magnitude. And again, we've been working on this for 5 years, and we see it in sections, and we see the whole master plan. We see all this stuff on computer screens or in real life as mock-ups. But when you see the finished scale on the interior, it is mind-boggling.  How do you service something like that? Is this just like man lifts or lord knows what?  Jonathan Labbee: Well, the venue is obviously designed with service capability. I mean, at the end of the day, how do you eat an elephant? It is basically one bite at a time, and it's pretty much what this is. I mean, it's a lot of the same type of stuff. So everything is broken down into sections and if you have a problem, you need to go to service. If you want to go look at something, you have access to that section in a particular fashion, and then you have access to the screen, and you can do whatever you need to do. I'm curious as well about some of the meat potato stuff, like video servers.  How do you develop something that can control that many LED modules and make it all addressable? When you went to your technical partners on that, was it a big, “Oh, boy, how do we do that?” Or was it, " Okay, we know how we could do that?”  Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, I think, I think it was more of a “yeah, we know how we can do that because our video processors are scalable in nature.” They technically don't have a limit, but then again, it's not just our stuff that needs to function. It's everything up and down the chain. So, we control everything from the video processor to the video screen. But everything upstream from us also has to function, and Here Against Here Studios, or MSG, design and create their very own control room with all of the workflow to function. So, from beginning to end, they have full control over the quality of the signal. What about the creative?  I assume that producing this stuff requires a certain set of skills and experience, which is very helpful. Is it hard to do, or do you kind of get instructions on what to do, and then you make it happen?  Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, my understanding is that the Sphere studios put together some templating and also offers its own production services to clients to make producing content much easier. So people are not just thrown into the project. They're helped all along the way.  One of the things that impressed me about the project is the type of content that's showing up on there that I think I, like millions of other people never would have even thought of. Have you been surprised by it?  Jonathan Labbee: Yeah. I have to say those guys have done an incredible job of coming up with some very interesting and creative ways of making that sphere look amazing, and you really never get tired of looking at it. I mean it's populating my Instagram feed and probably everybody else's. It's just incredible what they're able to put on there, and I think that they've been very clever in getting collaborations from different types of artists and collaborators.  When I was through Las Vegas late last year, I made a point of walking all the way over to the Sphere. I wanted to see what it looked like up close, and I have an industry friend who did the same, and it's this weird sensation of, now I see how this works and what the technology looks like up close, but it was almost like, that's something you shouldn't do. You really need to see this from a distance.  Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, and it was designed to be seen from a distance, but I think that it's very interesting. I can't say that this was planned in this way, but I mean, obviously, we're looking for performance criteria. So we designed around that, and a certain aesthetic, and probably the architects have thought about this, but as you approach the building and you start seeing how things are put together, there's a sense of revelation that you get when you approach the building, and it becomes even more personable to you. I thought that was pretty interesting because I had a similar experience when I went there for the first time. So what has this spawned? Do you have commercial property developers coming to you, resort operators? Who seems most inspired by this?  Jonathan Labbee: Well, yeah, I would say that the Sphere certainly awoke a new level of clients and types of projects. We normally work with the architects, so the architects who represent the owners and the property developers are coming to us with more and more intricate and large projects, which is super fun because not only do we develop technology, but we've designed an entire workflow, and toolset in order to design and efficiently manufacture and install and run these types of projects. Yes, I mean, we're getting large resorts in the Middle East right now, which is in a big flux of change, especially in Saudi Arabia. So there are a lot of these giga projects or mega projects spawning all over the place, and we're getting a lot of inquiries on that side, which is great.  Are they serious?  Sometimes, you see these magic mega projects in other jurisdictions, and there's a lot of PR noise around it, but nothing ever happens. But I suspect because some of these are funded directly by the Saudi government through PIF or whatever, they're going to happen. Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, I think in the past, it was maybe a bit more true that there were kind of these big dreams, and then they would just never materialize, but I think things have changed a lot in the region, where projects are actually getting built. There seems to be a big sense of change in the entire region. Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and that part of the world, continue to be very strong for us as well. So we're lucky that we're already out there and have delivered successful anchor projects.  What is involved in doing these? Is this like a three or five-year project? Jonathan Labbee: I would say that normally this would have been a three year project. Obviously the pandemic happened, which no one had anticipated, which drove all sorts of additional complexities in time. But I would say that a project like this, I believe originally had like a three year type of timeframe, and any mega project would have roughly the same type of timeframe.  One of the things that's interesting to me is, as we were discussing before, that maybe people don't know the full scope of what your company does. I didn't realize you had off-the-shelf products that you manufacture and can order. I kind of assumed it was all custom, but there, there is stuff that you can just buy, right?  Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have a whole suite of products that you can either utilize the way that they are or customize with brackets and carriers and these types of things. It is actually the bulk of our business, although we publicize more of the iconic type of projects simply because people like to hear about those.  Still, we do several hundred projects a year that are obviously much smaller and sometimes not as much talked about. Are those fixed projects or do they, or are they more about shipping out material that's going to be used by touring acts?  Jonathan Labbee: These are fixed projects. Although we do a lot of touring, we just launched Morgan Wallen last week with our new A5 series, which is an amazing product and show, but touring for us is, it's really great, obviously for recognition, but it's ALSO a fantastic place for us to try out new ideas. So it is really like an R&D lab, and that's why we continue to put so much effort into rental and touring.  We get to try out new ideas with clients who are willing to take chances and want to be the first, and then once you have something great, you refine it, and you make it more robust for permanent installation because, in a permanent installation, the criteria are quite different. You don't want to go up 1000 feet to change the light bulb, for example, right? That becomes very expensive. When I was on a tour, it lasted for a few hours. You can take it down. You could address things if you need to so there's a method to our madness, I would say. Is there linkage at all between, because you're a Montreal company, there's at least a couple of Montreal creative shops that have also done a lot of work with touring acts as well. Do those come together or are they kind of separate tracks and once in a while you bump into each other?  Jonathan Labbee: They are separate tracks, and oftentimes, we bump into each other. So, for example, when we did Orlando airport, the content designer for that was Gentilhomme who we know very well. We obviously have Moment Factory and a bunch of other creatives out here. So there's a really nice hub here, and we're all friends, by the way, so we all have lunch together and these types of things, because it's fun to talk about whatever we're working on. Going back to Sphere, the product that you developed particularly for the exosphere, is that something that you can turn around and productize, like turn into its own product that could, could be used, or is it really unique to that building?  Jonathan Labbee: It is unique to the building and has certain features specifically designed around its geometry. So, I think that those additional features would probably be lost if we were attempting to use it somewhere else, but in any case, it's not something that we would want to do with it. It has not only technological criteria but also aesthetic criteria that are unique to the Sphere. But the concept, though, of these pucks or discs of some kind that have LEDs embedded in them, I believe what you did at Burj Khalifa was kind of like sticks or something more.  Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, exactly. Burj Khalifa, because it was a linear approach, used a product that we call V-Stick that we customized for that particular building.  But if you take L.A. Stadium, for example, or SoFi Stadium, that has a puck format on the roof. There are, I think, about 35,000 of them, and you get a video image on the roof when you're flying above from LAX.  So anytime you've got curvature, a puck is probably going to be a lot easier to manage than a stick because you'd have to custom bend each of them, right? Jonathan Labbee: Yes, but it also depends on what the client is trying to achieve. So, if you take SoFi Stadium, they wanted to have an even spacing of the pixels, whereas Burj Khalifa had very different criteria. They were 30,000 pixels tall but only 72 pixels wide because we had to install them in between the windows. So, on the architectural things, each project kind of reveals itself in its architecture in terms of what product or what you should be designing to achieve their media.  When you work with architectural firms, do you have to invest some time at the front end with the architects, particularly on the engineering side of things, as opposed to the big vision side of things for them to understand what's possible and what's physics-defying?  Jonathan Labbee: I would say yes in the beginning, but we work with all of the major architect firms like Foster and Populous and those types, and the more and more projects that we do together, the more and more that we understand each other's criteria. Now, on our side, what we did to make sure that we could have ease in speaking with the architects, we have an entire architectural division within SACO. So we have a Spanish office that has seven architects, BIM integrators, computational programmers, and so on, which mimics the architects' workflow. So, not only do we work with them to show them what's possible, but we also work with them to design the technology within the architecture. Then, we are able to produce the drawings at their level, which they then incorporate into their drawing sets.  I'm guessing, I don't know the architecture business at all, but I'm guessing maybe a decade ago, there were one or two projects where people were thinking about architectural lighting of some kind, and it was this novel concept, and I'm wondering now if it's almost like a default concept for all flashy new buildings. Jonathan Labbee: Well, it is. If you want your building to stand out, you have to have some level of technology on it or some level of color or something because if not, you just fade into the background.  I guess I have come back to the whole idea of zoning that, I see skylines in China; it's just like the whole skyline; every building is lit up, and they're all animated, and they're all doing things, and I'm thinking, well, you can do that in China. I'm not sure you could do that in Long Island City in New York to face the Manhattan skyline with buildings doing that. Do you have to kind of factor that in? Jonathan Labbee: Oh, absolutely. I mean, actually, obviously anything governmental kind of tends to move at a slower pace. So we have built it into our workflow, and in the architect's workflow, let's say, the sensibility of making some tools and visualizations for the city zoning people and a perfect example of that would be F.C. Cincinnati, which we did with Populous. So F.C. Cincinnati is a soccer club, an MLS team, and the entire architecture of the building is like these fins that are kind of slanted and it gives like some level of static movement to the building, and our job was to animate those fins at night to give the nighttime identity. So we did an entire lighting study, and we have special filters built into the content so that, or into the content player, so that anywhere where it's facing residences, the light levels never exceed a certain amount.  We produced all of that, all of those studies with the architects, to present to the city on behalf of the client. What's the thinking around what level of, for lack of a more exotic description, razzle-dazzle is appropriate?  I'm thinking in Las Vegas, the Sphere makes perfect sense. That's on-brand for Las Vegas. I'm not sure that would make as much sense in, I don't know, San Francisco or Minneapolis or whatever and I have a lot of affection for much more subtle architectural lighting.  Jonathan Labbee: Yeah. But you have to think of the fact that Sphere is the extreme, right? It has a completely adaptive skin. So the skin, when there's no media on it, obviously, it's this dark surface, but the media at that point is designed for the environment. So, in Las Vegas, it's appropriate to have this very kind of flashy razzle-dazzle stuff.  But if you were doing something in San Francisco, the UK, or something like this, where you need it to be more subtle, the content would move maybe at a different speed and be produced in a different manner. Maybe it'll be more focused on lighting effects rather than full crazy commercials and that kind of thing. So, having adaptive skin is actually a really good thing in any environment because you can tailor it and adapt it as you move along. I'm assuming that it would be pretty difficult for more conventional LED display companies like the I don't need to rattle off the names, but the major manufacturers who put billboards up in Times Square and on the sides of stadiums, but it's not part of the architecture. It attaches to the architecture. It would be difficult for them to get into this because you've got a massive head start.  Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, I think it would be very difficult. I mean, also, there's a mindset that goes along with it. We don't choose the path of least resistance. I think the people that work here would get bored. But at the same time, you have to evolve over years, tool sets in order to accomplish these very difficult geometries because everything needs to support it from the back as well. You have to be able to do proper wiring diagrams and power layouts, and all this because it affects the entire architecture of that building, so we're doing it by choice, let's put it this way! I saw a post last week on LinkedIn about a company that's made a sphere, I don't know, 25 feet tall or something like that as a product. how do you react to those things?  Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, I guess I'll go with the analogy of trying to copy something is flattery. Again, it's not the first time that these types of things happened. Obviously, it's not on the same scale as the Sphere, but I mean, year after year, we see people trying to copy what we've done. Yeah, that can't be easy. I'm also curious about media facades and the use of LED within glass or applied to glass at some point. Are you being asked about doing that?  Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, so actually, many years ago, we actually designed some technology and actually have a patent for LEDs within glass, and we actually tried it out, and in concept, it sounds like a great idea, but in practice, it's not that great of an idea, as we found out, and what I mean by that is that there's a couple things:  First of all, if you need to replace something, you now need to pull the glass off of the building, which could affect the tenants inside. If it's a hotel, it's a hotel, you know what I mean? If it's an office building, it's an office building. You're not replacing the glass. But the other thing that it did is that it could have potentially put us in competition with some of our clients, which are the curtain wall manufacturers, and we work with all of them. So if we were to come up with our own glass product, and we were to try to go sell it, we're essentially either aligning ourselves with only one of them, or we're competing against all of them. So we had decided against that, but the serviceability of it was the bigger problem. Where are you at now in terms of headcount, where you're located, and everything else?  Jonathan Labbee: Yeah. So we're in Montreal still. We're just across the street from our old facility, which we were there for 35 years, and we're now in this beautiful 218,000-square-foot facility that we got into obviously with Sphere and other projects in mind, and we're 120 people strong, and when we're full project involved like with Sphere, we grew to about 380.  So we scale up, and we scale down depending on the projects, and we have arrangements with different companies for that and that's where we are now. Is it hard to be that elastic in terms of your workforce, given the challenges of hiring? Jonathan Labbee: Well, the pandemic certainly tested us. I mean, we've never had issues with it before, but the pandemic made it a bit more difficult. The way that we design our manufacturing and all of our testing—I mean, we have a lot of electronic aids and stuff like that—we, the core people that we have here, can be split up to become team leads. So, when we hire people, it's for the lower-skill positions. So it's easier. You have a bigger pool to choose from, and then after that, we scale back down when we don't need to do that anymore, and then our core workforce takes on all the responsibility.  So these could be logistics people who are just packing things up and so on? Jonathan Labbee: Correct. Exactly.  I assume you're NDA'd up the wazoo on a lot of projects, but are there ones that you can talk about that will be released in the next year or so?  Jonathan Labbee: So I can't really talk about them, but I can tell you that we're building a beautiful project in Spain after having an office there for, I don't know how many years, finally, we get to do a project in Spain and that's very exciting.  What part of Spain? Jonathan Labbee: In Valencia.  Oh, nice. Jonathan Labbee: So right near the sea and stuff like that. So I can't say what it is yet, but it's going to be beautiful, and as I mentioned, we literally just delivered Morgan Wallen last week and that's pretty exciting as well. What has the past couple of years meant for the company in terms of business? Has it just rocketed or is it just seen like a nice, healthy bump?  Jonathan Labbee: Well, I'm going to say it's going to be a controlled rocket because we, again, dealing with the pandemic is one thing and then supply chain and all that kind of stuff, but the other thing that we needed to be very disciplined about is to not take on too much work as to not affect the delivery of the Sphere, and that was on purpose, and we had spoken with our customers and our architects and stuff like that, and we were very selective in the projects that we took on during the big delivery of the Sphere. Thankfully, though, the pandemic did push a bunch of the projects into the future. So now those products are coming back to us, and we have a lot of bandwidth, and we're filling that up pretty fast.  I suspect as well that the simple fact that you've delivered this and it's got the global attention that it has certainly made your architecture partners and other potential customers very comfy that, yeah, you can do this! Jonathan Labbee: Oh, yes, absolutely. You know, and at the same time, we're not just a one-trick pony. We did deliver a very large project at Orlando airport at the same time and Delta the airfield at JFK and a bunch of other projects, the Rolling Stones and Lady Gaga and all those. So we continued doing everything kind of caused an undertow, but Sphere was a really big focus, and now that we've finished delivering Sphere, we're working on many other very exciting projects.  I'm sure there are lots of day-to-day headaches in terms of being the CEO of a technology company, but it sounds like you get some pretty fun road trips with all these touring acts and big venues. Jonathan Labbee: Yes, and you get to meet very interesting people and like-minded people, and you get to see behind the scenes, but look, it's a lot of work. There's no doubt about it. I mean, every day we're trying to do something different and do something new. So you're always kind of in that development mode, but when you see the results, and then you see the teams that you're building and the culture that you're building within the company, it makes you proud and makes it fun to be here.  Absolutely. Congratulations on the product or the project and on everything else that's going on with you! Jonathan Labbee: Well, thank you. Appreciate it.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I first spoke with industry lifer IV Dickson about his move from software to the managed services firm SageNet, the company was still in the relatively early days of getting itself organized to chase and then service digital signage opportunities. Five years on, digital in environments like chain retail and QSR are a core, what he calls consequential, part of the Oklahoma company's overall business. SageNet's role has evolved from being an IT-centric managed services company that was adding digital signage to its deployment and network management capabilities, to having a main service line called SageView. It's a full-meal-deal suite of solutions and services that run from the ideation stage all the way through deployment and ongoing management. These kinds of turnkey, all-in solutions are relatively common now in the marketplace, but the SageNet twist is its deep roots, experience and acumen in the hard-core aspects of networking design, connectivity and cybersecurity. Dickson started out at SageNet as the digital signage guy, but as business has grown, and with it the staffing and skillsets associated with that work, he now has a role as SageNet's Chief Innovation Officer - looking more broadly at all the technologies that have a role in or influence customer projects. IV Dickson, how are you doing, sir?  IV Dickson: I'm doing well. Thank you, Dave. How are you this morning?  I am good. We haven't chatted in a while. We did a podcast back in 2019, so I would say it's time for an update.  IV Dickson: We did. A lot has happened in five years, if nothing else, a pandemic, but also just a lot has happened in the SageNet, and SageView world for us. Yes. The last time I saw you, we were walking up a very long hill to the Barcelona Football stadium, and you're probably keeping a wary eye on me to make sure I didn't have a heart attack.  IV Dickson: Yeah, I don't know. It might have been mutual there, Dave, but I do know, though it was worth the walk. I will say that it was worth the walk.  Every little bit of it. So over those five years, quite a bit has changed with your company. I would say the big thing from my perspective is five years ago, SageNet was starting to get heavy into digital signage, but it was one of the things that a larger company did. When I look at the website now, I kind of see SageNet leading in certain respects with what it does in terms of digital experience and digital signage in general. Is that a fair assessment? IV Dickson: It is a fair assessment. And, by the way, my marketing team will be very glad to hear that because I think that's a position that we want to take and have taken. But we've also positioned ourselves in the market to be that, but also executed in the market to be that, and I think if I think about five years ago, one of the things I think I probably even said it five years ago in, in this podcast was we're a managed service provider in an integrator world. That really hasn't changed in many respects. There are still great integrators out there. However, what really has changed for us is the way people are now coming and looking at digital experience, digital engagement, and pure digital signage, right?  Call it passive or a kind of consumable digital signage. It's become more important today than ever to manage that in an ongoing fashion, and management is not just content. It's everything. Is the screen on? Is the player running? If it's broken, or when it's broken, how are you getting it fixed? And that's a big piece of the puzzle, and over five years, we've grown a lot. I mean, we've grown exponentially to be honest in this area. We were a few customers with a few thousand devices out in the world, and now we're north of a hundred thousand devices that are under management in that digital experience realm. So, as a managed services company as a whole, what do digital signage and digital signage-sih activities represent for the company? I don't need an exact percentage, but I'm curious.  IV Dickson: That's a great question because it's something that actually was a driver for me in my previous role at SageNet as the VP of digital signage and digital experience: to make it a consequential piece of our business. And so at this point in time, whereas five years ago, it was just a mosquito kind of on the sideline of our portfolio. It is now one of the pillars of our organization. So if you look at our organization, historically, we still track the traditional managed services of circuitry and router switch firewalls. However, now, the idea of IOT and IOT management, digital experience, and digital signage management kind of lined up in three pillars for us.  I have heard a few times now that one of the things that's really changed in the last five years or so again is how, historically, the first meetings that you would have with a larger enterprise-level customer or prospective customer would be with the visual merchandising people, HR people, business communicators, that sort of thing, and the IT people would be there, but only begrudgingly. And, now they tend to lead these initiatives and guide them.  Have you seen that? Does it help the case for SageNet because they're familiar with the kind of work that you do?  IV Dickson: Yes, and yes. Yes, we are seeing that shift in who's leading the effort, and yes, that has been obviously fruitful for SageNet, but also just for the market as in general, to be honest. What I mean by that is that the marketing initiative has not been dampened; it's still the guiding light or the Northstar associated with the effort. Now, you're getting buy-in from the organization about the importance of this type of infrastructure in a distributed environment. So if you have a thousand restaurants or five hundred or a thousand stores, all of a sudden, when you have a director or even a CIO-level IT person in the room saying this is something that's consequential to our business, that changes the level of investment from a general brand perspective. The other thing that we've seen, to be honest, is that we've seen its scope outside of it, marketing and even operational folks that are in the building, or as everybody's talking about retail media networks and how this bigger trade or merchandiser world factors into that conversation as well, depending on the brand. One of SageNet's other big pillars is cybersecurity. Are you finding that's helpful in the pitch and in the ongoing effort for clients in that you have that pedigree, you have that understanding? It's not, “Yeah, we do have a cyber guy. His name is, let me look it up.” It's part of your DNA.  IV Dickson: Exactly. It's one of the greatest parts of our extended portfolio. So, about a year ago, I took the role of chief innovation officer, and it's been a journey for me, not only to understand some of the technologies that I didn't understand well but also to understand some of the technologies and wrap my brain around how do customers see that footprint and to your point about cyber security if you look not only at cyber, but you look at how cellular is affecting the market and you also look at the pure infrastructure that's going into one of these restaurants or into one of these retailers, and you start to realize that the POS that used the point of sale that used to be one of the primary network consumers, and by the way, it's still one of the primary from a cyber perspective.  However, it's a very small footprint compared to all the other aggregate devices that they now have talking on the network, whether that be IOT monitoring devices or whether it be digital signage and digital experience devices, or whether it be guest and or brand WiFi, all of a sudden the cyber level or the management of that connectivity becomes even more important than it was maybe ten years ago. And now you have changes in that market around not only how it's managed, but also around protocols that are being utilized, and you start to look at PCI 4. 0, and all of a sudden the brands are getting that much more intense in their needs, but also smarter in their requirements. And so when you bring in a media player and a screen, they no longer say, “Hey, we're going to stick this on the network.” They want a deep dive into how that's going to communicate and communicate with what and for what purposes.  Yeah. I think many more traditional pro IV integration companies and solutions providers lack that perspective and experience. When you look at something like a restaurant or a retail operation, as you just said, all the different business systems and sensors and everything falling into it, it's just a big chart to be able to try to understand all that.  IV Dickson: It is, and luckily I have fantastic team members, right? We've brought in folks with senior-level capabilities from the industry, not only from pure restaurant retail but also from the I.T. on the side. We have fantastic folks in our organization to be able to tackle that because, to your point, one of the differences, and I talked to many of our partners about this in the industry. One of the differences in our business that a lot of people don't recognize from a traditional integrator perspective is when we walk in the door as SageNet, we make two near assumptions.  If we're talking to a restaurant or even a retailer, we make the assumption that you're geographically dispersed, which means you're probably over at least 5, if not 10, or 50 States. So you're all over the country. But the second assumption we make is that your ownership environment is potentially variable. What that means is it could be a franchise, a dealer, or some qualification of the licensee, and in that scenario, you're then adding a layer of complexity to that individualized brick-and-mortar environment that you're servicing, and that creates major complexity in the process.  Yeah, cause they might not all use the same business systems for some core operations, right?  IV Dickson: You got it. Especially when you get into the dealer and licensee world, and that's really where our focus on that, what happens in the “four walls” of that local environment, and then how do we bring that back to a more macro level of IT and AV management?  One of the things that SageNet did, and I assume, added to its breadth of capabilities and bench strength, was acquiring Convergent back in, I think, 2021. Why was that done, and what does that meant?  IV Dickson: We did acquire Convergent Media Systems back in 2021 and it's an interesting conversation about why was it done versus what has it meant. I think actually it's relative to both, and yet there's some separation, right? The interesting thing that a lot of folks don't know is that there was some distant relationship between SageNet and Convergent prior to the acquisition because of the VSAT environment that SageNet acquired from SpaceNet, the better part of 10+ years ago, and so part of our business is VSAT Uplink for connectivity and Convergent back in the day was doing much of their delivery of Corp comm and digital signage and whatnot, TV broadcast type work over VSAT protocols.  So there was some natural connection there that kind of tied the two organizations together. However, at the really the kind of height of the pandemic, luckily, in some respects, but also prescribed in others, SageNet had grown, and our SageView digital offering had grown to about half of the size that it is today, and we've done that organically, right? We had team members that we had grown a fair amount of operational team members at the time. We had brought on Rob Suffoletta back from the Seneca day to day, and he was there a few years ago. And, so things were starting to churn, and we were about half the size that we are today. The acquisition at the time of Convergent took that business and positioned it in a place where it was about double, not quite, but about double, and so it was very substantial. The other piece of that puzzle and I'm very proud to say this, is we acquired some really fantastic folks in that acquisition, including some real leaders in the digital industry who have substantially more experience than I do, 30 years in this industry from broadcast to digital signage. So, in that moment, we kind of bolstered our operational environment.  What subsequently has happened, and it's a good outcome of any acquisition when you can make this happen, we are now a broader force to deal with in the market. So our capabilities are beyond just Installation, monitoring, and management of hardware and software, and now we have capabilities to build solutions, to code against APIs and or pure I.P. We also have creative capabilities to augment what customers may have or what they may want through our experience labs group and so there's the footprint now of the capabilities that we bring to the table is a much more rounded out environment than it was three years ago when we first made that acquisition.  Now, does that all roll up under SageViw?  IV Dickson: Yes, that's correct. Yeah, SageView is a SageNet sub-brand, as you would call it, and that is specifically digital experience and digital signage. There's some kind of muddying of the waters between that and our SageIoT environment.  I remember going back a couple of years, I think I referenced it as kind of a full meal deal offer now that you can take a project right from the idea stage all the way through to ongoing management and do things like you just mentioned, doing the creative work and so on. IV Dickson: Yes, that's exactly right. And if you look at just digital experience, our capabilities to now engineer and design an outcome and a solution and then bring that to fruition by hardware acquisition as well as configure kit and install. But then all of that, as we still really talk about on a daily basis, it's every conversation that we have. We do a lot of that just for the purpose of day two because still, five years later, we talked about this five years ago, I'm sure, the value of that technology is on day two or day fifty or day five hundred. It's only as somebody in my organization says: day one is only cool for 24 hours, right? So that's really a big piece of that. But then, as we were talking about earlier, with regards to the portfolio, when you expand that digital experience, that SageView footprint and you start to add SageConnect, whether that be cellular or otherwise, you start to add SageIoT, then all of a sudden the footprint even gets bigger in terms of that, and that's really where we strive, and you look at someone like Noodles & Co, for example, that's a solution that we have been a network provider for many years. Last year, we subsequently rolled out to all of their corporate locations with digital and a network upgrade. but that's where the entire infrastructure of those four walls is key to that conversation. Are you having companies come to you primarily with the idea that SageNet is capable of handling the degree of scale that we're looking at. We need to be out to 800 stores in the next six months or something like that versus jobs that, let's say, an Electrosonic, those kinds of companies might do that's an airport, it's one location. It's one big wow factor thing that I suppose you guys could do in theory, but that's not really your sweet spot, is it?  IV Dickson: No, not at all. And actually, to be totally honest with you, we sometimes leave those deals on the table on purpose and when you talk about scale and deployment, that is such a key piece to this environment that people do forget and it's hard to roll out that type of technology not only at scale but fast, and these retailers and restaurants expect fast. Back in 2021, we were in the midst of a deal that we are still managing today. They had extremely high expectations of rollout, and we were doing nearly 300 installations a day during the month of June 2021, and we did the better part of 10,000 installations in eleven months.  Was this retail or QSR?  IV Dickson: Retail, but I mentioned Noodles & Co, that's about 400 locations. We did all of that in the 2023 calendar year for the most part, some 95+ percent. So you have to have some serious project managers.  IV Dickson: We do have some serious project managers. That's one of the things I really like is we have those called macro or global project managers. We also have a really amazing field management team, and those folks are dealing with config, the kit, and our national logistics center and getting it out. Then, the onsite technicians make sure that the installation is done correctly.  Is the competitive landscape evolving? Are you seeing different kinds of companies getting in the competitive mix of opportunities?  IV Dickson: You know, when you started to ask that question, I thought, boy, howdy, has it changed! If you look at the vertical markets, some things are identical to what they were before. I would say retail is still pretty similar. The folks who play in retail and who really excel in retail haven't changed a ton. Where we do see a lot of change in the market space from a competitive landscape perspective, QSR is a quick-serve restaurant and fast casual. Not only are there a lot of new names, but they're also not really new to the market. They're new in that space. There's also a lot of different offerings and it's very cloudy. It's extremely cloudy and selecting a provider because we're not there's a, there are a handful of folks that do what we do or similar to what we do. There's a handful of folks who really are on the manufacturing side and creating great technologies. But they're selling those as holistic solutions, and they might not be, and then you still have the historic landscape of the content management systems, and CMS is out there that everybody goes, well, I don't know what to do with 85 CMSs, right? So that's where the competitive landscape is still the same, and yet you are seeing a lot of volatility in who's in the room.  Does it get murky because you have all kinds of companies with different sorts of software-driven systems that can bolt on a very rudimentary digital signage application and say, okay, here we've got a digital menus application for you? You don't need to buy a license, a CMS, or something else; just use this. Do you get those questions?  IV Dickson: You do, and you get some of that bolt-on conversation, and by the way, some of that is probably in our pitch deck as well because there are things that we do that are custom to a customer or customized for a customer around that. However, if you think about my background, I was at Scala Stratacache and back at NanoNation, and we're talking over 20 years, I've watched a lot of that change. I think a lot of people today, there's two factors that kind of drive that.  One is that many people don't understand the complexity of managing an enterprise-level menu. They think they're template managers; they think simple integrations will do it. When you get down to what might be fifty or a hundred or even two hundred configurations, it's extremely complex to manage all that content and data. I think the other thing though, that's driving that conversation that the customer really struggles with picking the right solution is today, data integration and usage in menus is higher than it's ever been. The ability to get calories and price and even dynamic images or have dynamic capabilities to resort menus based on configurations. There's more landscape around that type of capability than we've ever had before. That clutters the idea of what my CMS does in its pure interface. What is the UI to take care of versus what am I going to have to go build and manage? And we, to be honest, in many respects, have fantastic CMS partners, and yet we downplay the use of that interface because most customers want that managed, and so they're not going to go and become experts inside of a CMS interface. Yeah. Years ago, a very large QSR contacted me. They were very irritated with their CMS company because of some business moves that they made. They engaged me as a consultant, and one of the first questions was, what do you think of the software, because, you know, they wanted to consider moving on from it.  And I said, well, we've never seen it, and I said, pardon me, and they said, well, it's all managed, and I said, well, can you get a log in? And they're like, well, we can ask for one, but we've never logged in or anything, and I thought, whoa, this is like completely managed remotely. I guess it was a glimpse of where a lot of the business was going because you'd want to focus on making coffees or whatever. IV Dickson: Yeah, it is, absolutely, and also, you have layers of software that are above the CMS now that are as valuable or more valuable, and yet they feed the outcome of the CMS, right? They feed the outcome of the menu, so if you have mobile data, a menu data management system, Adobe Experience Manager, or some other creative digital asset management environment, those are all sitting in a macro environment above that CMS, feeding into it and then getting distributed to those individual locations.  With SageU, you also introduced something called digital merchandiser two or three months ago, where you're doing some degree of software, like presentation-level software and management software, that might more traditionally be done by a CMS. Is there a bit of a dance that you have to do with your partners where it doesn't feel like you're starting to eat through their lunch?  IV Dickson: Yes and no. I think the real key to that conversation is that SageNet builds and deploys solutions in the end. We utilize best-in-breed outcomes from hardware and software providers to do that, and we utilize incredibly talented and skilled folks on the inside of our team who do that as well. Our head of R&D, David Kai, who also oversees our IOT buildout, comes to the table and sees this from a greater solution perspective. So when you bring him into the room, it's not a CMS discussion. It's an outcome-driven customer and customer outcome-driven environment, and you and I have joked online. We talked a little bit about it in Barcelona. This is actually where I embrace the idea of physigital. I know there's a lot of people who don't like that, right? However, if you really think about the idea of physigital beyond just marketing fodder and you think physical and digital, the consumer who has made the decision to go to a brick-and-mortar location, they've made the decision to go to a C Store, they've made a decision to go to a restaurant, they've made a decision to go to a retailer. They have the expectation of how digital technology is going to affect that, but it's just grown exponentially over the last five to ten years, especially with the pandemic. It created a situation where we did almost everything digitally. So now we're going back to that.  When you really think in that four-wall environment, and you think about, okay, they made it to my physical location. I now want digital to enhance their experience, then digital works for me, right? It becomes something of value. To that end, then we had to take what the infrastructure was and the solutions were the best-in-breed pieces that we had, and create solutions around that. So you mentioned digital merchandiser, there's a new video out that's about an artificial intelligence shoe kiosk that we showed.  It's about the integration of all the parts and bringing those to a space where they become seamless for the consumer, but they become wildly valuable for the brand. I joked at NRF because we showed lift and learn, and I've shown lift at learning at NRF before. Probably in 2004?  IV Dickson: You got it, right? However, the idea is that I walk into the store, look at something in the mobile app, walk up to the AI kiosk, ask it for a product, it shows me where that product is, I pick it up, and I'm then having a web and physical experience in a very similar manner, or a digital and physical experience. Those capabilities have become possible because our engineering base in what we monitor and manage was extremely solid. We added the team members, not only through acquisition but also through a refinement of how we engage through experience labs and bringing David Kai into those conversations with software development capabilities and then really listening to our customer's voice is key for this, and so that's a big piece of this puzzle is really listening to what the customer is trying to accomplish, and finding the avenues where digital can help with that, not replace it, not be the only thing, but help with that transaction. Last question. I'm curious because we've mentioned Barcelona a couple of times. I go for my own reasons. A lot of people go over cause they're selling stuff or whatever. As a chief innovation officer, I suspect you're going over there because there's great wine, but that you're there to kind of see what's emerging, what's different, and it's a different walk than what you're going to do, walking around NRF or InfoComm, that sort of thing?  IV Dickson: Yeah, very much so. I mean, ISE, for me, is still a location that has more value. Visual technology in one place than anywhere else. I can spend three or four days walking around somewhat by myself or with colleagues, friends, or folks from the industry. But I can consume that and be able to say to myself, what's out there that I'm not using, or how can I use something differently? You know, I use a quote many days, I think it was the MTV founder who said, “Innovation is taking two things that are known and putting them together in a new way.” I think that's actually the thing that we've somewhat forgotten in this industry is that sometimes we don't have to go build something brand new if we can make something new and interesting out of pieces we already have. And, Barcelona, regardless of location, although Barcelona is a great location, the reality of that conversation is I go to look to see like, what are people doing? What is starting to drive the industry? And to see the year-over-year refinement of transparent OLED, and to see now the influx of transparent, or call them holographic, I don't know that I would call them that, but that's what the Muxwave folks call them that, that environment, but then also now to see what's going on with Kinetic LED and moving pieces and parts while the LED is showing visual capabilities. But then, even going back, I took a video of Epson. They had a massive umbrella, and it was covered in projectors. It was just a reminder that technology is out there and how it gets used. People often forget that this industry is not entirely new, and yet there are many different ways to do stuff that are actually super exciting.  Yeah, I always say these trade shows are not about giant leaps; they're incremental advances, and you have to have the knowledge and experience where it's helpful to have that knowledge and experience to recognize, I go, oh, that's interesting, they've done this. It's not like I'm blown away by it, but oh, they've conquered this little challenge, and now it's better. IV Dickson: Yeah, that's exactly right.  IV, we could talk for three hours, but I try to keep these to a certain time window, so I'm going to shut this down. It was great chatting. IV Dickson: Dave, thank you so much for the time, and look forward to seeing you soon out on the road.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I asked an industry friend, whose opinions I respect and trust quite a bit, what CMS software he'd looked at and been impressed by, he rattled off a few companies I was expecting to hear about, but also mentioned the platform developed and marketed by a smallish UK company called NowSignage. He'd seen a lot of different options, but these guys he said, had something that was very modern and nimble. I finally got my act together and scheduled a chat with founder Nick Johnson. Now's roots are in pushing social media messaging to big screens at live events - like concerts and big games. Requests started evolving, both in terms of what could be done with screens and how long they'd be used - which led in part to him concluding the future business was in permanent installations and revenue that was recurring and predictable, versus periodic. Now markets its product as being affordable and not focused on a particular market segment, like QSR, workplace or whatever. That generalist approach tends to worry me, because buyer decisions tend to get focused on price, as in who costs the least. But in my chat with Johnson, he explains that their market focus is on what he calls multi-screen management - networks with a lot of locations and a lot of screens. Most companies would also say they want that and do that, but as Johnson explains in our chat, that's easy to talk about, but much harder to do well. I also had to ask about the Frankenstein'd Rolls-Royce that was the eye candy for the NowSignage stand at ISE in Barcelona. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Nick, thank you for joining me. I know NowSignage reasonably well. I suspect a lot of other people do as well, but could you maybe just give me a rundown on the background of the company, what it is you do, what's distinct, that sort of thing?  Nick Johnson: Yeah, sure. Cheers for having me on, Dave. And, yeah, nice to be here. Yeah, so NowSignage, for those who don't know who we are, is a UK-based business that has been around since 2013. A lot of people thought we launched a market and were in a big whirlwind storm about six years ago, but actually, the tech has been being developed since 2013 now, and then we really honed in on the permanent signage market around seven or eight years ago, really. In terms of signage, we position ourselves as a multi-screen management platform that allows our users to effectively and efficiently manage large networks of screens. So, we don't really focus on a specific vertical specialism. So, with IE, we're not a specific sector, like a corporate sector outright or anything like that. Our specialism is really around meeting the needs and demands of projects that have multiple screens, often in multiple locations or multiple sites, so those large-volume projects are our specialism.  Now, I would imagine most software companies would say: we can fully support large enterprise level, big footprint projects across multiple locations and all that, so that doesn't immediately hit me as a distinction, but I'm guessing you're going to tell me that it's easier said than done?  Nick Johnson: Exactly. So normally, as you say, with CMSs, and we found it ourselves in the early days, we had an eye on those bigger projects, but in reality, as soon as it got above 50 screens, that becomes a challenge for a CMS. It's got a different thought process that needs to go into the CMS from an intuitive nature, but also, your platform needs to be built to kind of balance those enterprise features alongside the simplicity, flexibility, and scalability of the platform.  So yeah, there are some nuances that, for sure, where if you want to manage those large scale projects, you really need to nail the ability to make it as easy as possible for those end users to target specific screens with specific promotions or specific content and that's quite a powerful and hard to achieve thing within a CMS. It's all about bringing those features to enable that functionality.  So, if I'm an end user or even a reseller integrator looking at different options out there, what's my sniff test (or smell test) to determine who can genuinely support large-scale networks like that?  Is it data integration, you know, is it elasticity, at the server level? What are those things?  Nick Johnson: Yeah, both of those, obviously, come into consideration. The way we position our product is that we ultimately want it to be self managed by the user. So if it can't be easy to be managed by the user, then you've got a problem, and to make it easy to be managed by the user, you do need those features in the platform like very advanced targeted tags or roles and permissions for locking down areas of the platform. The targeted tags will allow people to target localized stores with localized messages based on the tagging functionality. I'd probably say the most important thing is just giving that flexibility throughout the platform. You can't say that all scheduling has to be done in the scheduling area. You need to be more flexible on that. So in the NowSignage CMS, we enable certain degrees of different types of scheduling to happen, whether it's in the content area, the actual playlist area, the scheduling area, and even at the screen's level, there are different types of tools that you can use to meet the requirements of the customer.  So, it's not always one size fits all. You have to go to that customer and say, look, we've got this feature set here that makes it easy to manage large networks. What's your specific requirement here? And we may turn around and go, great. You want to use our targeted tags and our override functionality, or we might say you want to use nested playlists and the ability to set assets to show and remove at set dates and times. So, it's giving that broader flexibility within the CMS to adapt to their needs.  I'm curious as well about the whole idea of affordability. It's one of the things that comes across on your site pretty quickly that you talk about it being cost effective and affordable. But it's also pretty sophisticated, like a lot of the platforms that say they're affordable, it's because, they do the basics.  Nick Johnson: Yeah, and I'm glad you used the word affordable there because I don't like the word cheap. So, for us, it's not a race to the bottom. We're not about being the cheapest. We're about being what you get out of our package, which is the most affordable. It's the most cost-effective. So you get the most amount of performance out of our platform for the cost and ratio. So yeah, it's all about affordability. So, with the platform, we don't charge for add-ons within the platform.  When you get access to NowSignage, you get access to all our features and functionality, and you even get access to them as we roll out new features and functionality; they become free for all end users to use. So that's why we appeal, as I said at the start there, we don't really have a sector specialism; we focus on the type of customer that we want to work with, and then often those customers we find because we operate, let's say with lots of supermarkets, a supermarket isn't just a retail requirement in the front of the store. A true requirement for a supermarket is actually they want to centralize that CMS and they have a retail requirement. They have a retail media network requirement. They have a digital out-of-home requirement. They have a back office requirement. They have a factory and manufacturing plant requirement. So all of these requirements are completely different, and the NowSignage platform allows those users to pull on different features and functionalities in the platform. So they may in their manufacturing plant use our Microsoft Power BI integration for showing dispatch information and fleet management, whereas in the retail media network, they might be using our proof of play functionality, which, as you've alluded to, is very much an enterprise feature and it normally very often doubles the cost of a license. We absorb all of those costs, from our servers and so on because we spread that across our whole customer base. So, yeah, it's absolutely the most affordable is how we position ourselves, not the cheapest in the race to the bottom.  Yeah, I've often said that if you're going to be a generalist, that can be a little deadly because you are just competing on price by and large, but what you're saying is, we go across a number of vertical sectors, but we're not really a generalist because our specialty is large, multi-screen networks. Nick Johnson: Yeah, and what you will get with those networks as well, because of the types of brands and customers that you're working with for those projects, it's not really about just selling features and competing on cost for those large networks. Now, obviously, they will be price-driven because often they go out to tender, so you do need the ability to really come down on your price, which we have that capability to do so we can be very competitive on price, but equally, what the brands wanna see is they really want to build a partnership with that CMS to get confidence from you that you are advising them on how to structure their account to maximize the usage of your platform, to meet their goals and of what they require from the network. So if you can communicate and instill that confidence, I think that's really where you find the winning edge to things.  You also, as a company, say that your hardware is agnostic. I have seen all kinds of companies go down that path, and many of them then almost surrender and come up with their own dedicated player devices.  I don't think it's because they're making extra hardware margin; it's just that they grow wary of trying to support all these different types of hardware, and the much easier path is to just have their own, which they can control because they know the build and everything else. So, how do you manage being agnostic across so many different platforms? Nick Johnson: Yeah, so it's all about getting the feature parity across all those different operating systems. There are so many out there. You've got the standard kind of Android, Windows, Linux, all of those. But then you've got the more proprietary ones with the system on chip, where a lot of them are really using an Android base there but you've got Samsung with Tizen, LG with WebOS, BrightSign with their setup there. So, yeah, we've got one centralized code base, and so I probably can't share too much about that and give our full game away, but yeah, we've got one centralized code base set, which delivers feature parity across all those builds. So when we make a change within the platform, we don't need to make it for seven different builds or ten different builds. We don't have to support lots of builds of the platform, meaning lots of developers. We have one centralized build, and that is built in a way that is then compatible with all operating systems out there. So you may have seen that on our stand at ISE. At ISE, we had three or four BrightSign displays. We had a large video wall that was powered by a Windows player. We had a Sony system on-chip display and a Samsung system on-chip display, and on one setup there via the show Wi-Fi, which is very flaky at times, we managed to achieve perfect screen synchronization across different hardware again, which is quite unusual.  Not only are we offering parity across the hardware, but actually with features like Screen Sync, we can bring all of that together and actually offer the synchronization to take into account those different processing powers and speeds and so on. Does that mean if you inherit a network and you're then going to expand on it and it has multiple different operating systems on different devices and so on, you can manage them all off of your application without having something in the middle, like Signage OS or whatever? Nick Johnson: Absolutely, and I think that's what's so important with the types of customers that we're onboarding is that they will have a network that's out there that's got legacy hardware and screens in there, and they're not in a position where they want a huge outlay of cost to go and transform all that hardware over brand new hardware. So because we can sit on a system on a chip, we can sit on the media players, we also work closely with those partners, as you've mentioned, the Signage OS, if there was a requirement there, then we could sit alongside that. But generally, because we have that feature parity and the hardware-agnostic approach, there's no requirement for that additional layer that needs to be added, so it can reduce all the costs and also mean that the network can be rolled out at relative ease and speed as well.  Some of the other software applications out there that say they are hardware agnostic, they're able to do that because it's a somewhat truncated application. It's a web player or something. So yes, you can get content, all the different operating systems or whatever, but it's not a pure player. It can't do everything that a native player could do.  Nick Johnson: Yeah. So, ours is a full application in the way that it's powered. So we are a Chrome OS partner, and we can run through a browser mode or any sort of environment like that where it needs to be embedded into a web page or as a browser player, but yeah, the way our code base packages or fit packages, or everything is its own native application. A few companies have started talking, well, they've been talking about a few things, but one of them is this idea of headless CMS and the idea that, if I have a tool set that I'm already using within a larger company, that's pushing out to web, mobile, intranet, extranet, whatever it may be, they want to use that tool set to also do digital signage as opposed to logging into a separate application. Can you do that sort of thing?  Nick Johnson: So are you referring to embedding us into different environments so that we could be played within an intranet environment?  Probably more so that the development, the scheduling, a lot of what you would do for a digital sign network, you could do within another application, and the digital signage platform is kind of the plumbing, the infrastructure that moves things around. It's kind of the way that Samsung with VXT now is positioning itself as you can write your application on top of our platform.  Nick Johnson: Yeah. So, normally, we operate with a fully open API. So we really want to be the source and the conduit for everything coming into it. So we won't go out there and build some specialist functionality that other platforms already build a lot better than us, like a Microsoft Power BI integration; we wouldn't try and build something like that or a Quividi integration that we've got if we want to do audience measurement with camera systems and so on, we have an API there. So we can pull all of those great features and functionality together and then be the source to output that.  Similar to QSR environments, things like with the API, we sit in harmony with their product systems. So, if they want to do dynamic pricing, we will just be another outlay to them. They will look at the output to all the other different avenues for that pricing, and we will just be a different source that they're inputting into. Then, we'll showcase that dynamic pricing data on the screen. So yeah, we've got an open API, and we're kind of pulling all that data resource into NowSignage. I would imagine the data side of things is super important, the ability to support all that?  Nick Johnson: Yeah, from two angles, really. In terms of the data capacity on our side, we've just gone through a full year's process of improving and upgrading our infrastructure. So, the infrastructure of a CMS is super important. It is arguably what sets a lot of CMSs apart. You've found in recent years that there are certain CMSs that have risen to the top and that they're probably the ones that have invested in their infrastructure, their scalability as a brand, and their security. So, likewise, we've done the same.  Our infrastructure is invaluable to the platform. If we have downtime or anything that's going to impact our size of customers, which isn't acceptable, but also the data that we can then pull together and aggregate to then analyze and give back to the customers inside the platform is obviously crucial as well, and that's probably going to be a big focus for us this year. We already have features like proof of play in the platform that can report on when, where, and how many times an advert is played on the screen, and all of that is live data that comes through. So customers don't need to wait for that data, and we obviously have lots of information about the status of the screens and the uptime status and the ability to kind of set them to go on and off and push our app updates and all of that kind of good stuff. But I think that will be a big push this year to analyze and help our customers understand that data more and more, knowing exactly where their screens are and what's happening with them.  Your company is young enough in relative terms that I suspect you're not saddled with some of the problems that, or challenges that, really well established companies may have in terms of they have a software application that's, they've been building off of for 15-30 years, in some cases, versus what you've got. If you started in 2013 and you kind of emerged a few years after that, you've got a platform that's using modern web tools and everything else, and you're a lot more malleable, I suspect.  Nick Johnson: Exactly, and a lot of the team that I've brought together as well, we're all from completely different sectors, but before that, created and delivered and brought to market a very successful SaaS business there in a completely different sector. So, as I built this business, I brought on a lot of the expertise from the old CTO, and my investor and my business partner are from that background as well. So right at our core, we understand how SaaS businesses and tech need to work. So we're not from a hardware background. We're not interested in the hardware. We're interested in it. How can this software be the most efficient and scalable piece of software and also the most innovative piece of software?  So you're right, probably the timing of it and in the sense that digital signage had kind of become to get a bit more established around that point and knew its place, so we don't have all the legacy burden of the hardware and having to build on and revamp our infrastructure with.  We've managed to build a very clean UI from day one, but also from the experience and background of myself, but also the people that I've built around the team, where we're really focused on SaaS and technology and innovation, that's what we live and breathe every day, really. And the company kind of grew out of, or at least was inspired by, I believe, it was pushing social media to screens at live events. Is that correct?  Nick Johnson: Yeah, let's be honest. It was probably me just having a bit of fun in my mid-twenties at that point. So, yeah, the way it all started was I was working for a company that was a web agency at that point, developing websites. And so my part in that business was that we developed a piece of technology that was embedding social feeds into those websites. So, at the time, just before 2013, I separated that as a separate company and thought, wouldn't it be great if we could get some social content onto screens at events.  This was kind of around the time that the Twitter walls were emerging. So it was right at the early stage of that. So our first ever event was actually at the Olympic stadium, and we were powering the big screens where people were taking Instagram pictures and popping them onto big screens and I couldn't really believe what I'd got into at that point. So, I just enjoyed the ride for a few years. We got shipped around all over the world, doing large events and as we did more of those events, I suppose the platform evolved, which is why the platform is so intuitive and focused just around the software because we kind of started off with that base and then we were doing events where people then wanted to advertise onto the screen. So we had to bring in some advertising capability to show images and videos, and then before we knew it, we started doing some more permanent setups where we needed to bring in that better structure and management and, then, as I say, probably around, I can't remember the exact date now, but it must've been around seven or eight years ago. Just overnight, it was 90 percent of our revenue at the time, I just decided we needed to focus on permanent signage. That was the model that was going to work. That's the sustainable model and the growth model that we wanted. So we kind of just made the ballsy move at that point that we were ditching all of that income, and we focused permanently on permanent digital signage and because we have the background of the platform already, as I say, people were looking at us going, who are these guys who have come to market and we've just kind of won four AV awards in a row. But, actually, it's because the software was there, and we actually just needed to understand what the channel was and what the industry was and that's what we focused on, and we don't sell directly at all. We only sell directly through our resell reseller channel, whether it's a balance of integrators or distributors, and that's how we now go to market.  It's funny, I was talking about that with somebody else yesterday about the channel and the opportunities and challenges of doing that and how difficult it can be to sell direct if you also have channel partners. You're kind of saying that you've got to choose door number one or door number two. You can't go through both.  Nick Johnson: Yeah, and I think it's a fine balance, and I'd say certainly in where we come from, it's always through the channel, but I have seen some variances globally that some people say that the channel in Europe, and then in the US that they're selling direct because they get a big contract and the brand wants to work direct. We've actually just secured a very large project in the US, which is great news for us, but the relationship of that is that we engaged directly and we built trust with the end user and we demonstrated our platform, but now it's come through to a commercial point. We are absolutely funneling that through the channel because that's how you build that trust and that relationship with the channel. So that's now being commercially funnel funneled through one of our channel partners, and then off the back of that. For us, there's no way that we can; we would never do a direct deal because that kind of breaks our whole model of how we're going to market and how we're building trust with our resellers that they're ultimately our partner and our direct customer.  And are you white-labeled and totally behind the curtain, or would the end user know that this is NowSignage as managed by Brand X? Nick Johnson: In almost all circumstances, they will know it's NowSignage. What we don't do is we don't do white labels for our resellers. We want them to proudly shout about it being NowSignage. So everybody at the sales point knows that they are purchasing NowSignage. In some instances, once it then goes through the end user, they go, great, we're now using NowSignage, but actually, we want our staff to log into an environment that feels familiar and friendly to them; at that point, we can white label for the end user, but at no point is it hidden and that it's NowSignage. It's NowSignage all the way and then when the end users dive in, we can white label to an end user requirement.  Yeah, I've always wondered about white labeling. I understand the task and everything, but if you do that as a reseller, there's then an expectation you really know your way around the software, and I suspect that there are a lot of uncomfortable phone calls and meetings.  Nick Johnson: Yeah, and also, I think you get that frustration as well. We've found fortunately that we've managed to secure some of those resellers who have traditionally sold a white-labeled CMS, and the frustrations that they've actually ended up happening is that they get a demand from an end user to say, we need this feature, and we need it right now. Now, it's not their code base. They don't own the IP. They don't own the code. They've got no developers. So, at that point, they have to go back to the CMS and say, can you build this? But I think from a CMS's point of view, that kind of, like, well, you're a white-label solution so you now just need to join the queue of things, whereas with us, we have that open dialogue with the end user and with our reseller. So if a request comes in, it funnels straight to us, and we control that kind of destiny of where those features come in, and we're very transparent with that roadmap to react.  ISE was a couple of months ago. You guys were there when I was walking around. I was expecting to hear a lot more about AI from different software companies. Here's how we're using AI. Here's how we're applying it. Here's the opportunity, and so on.  But maybe it's just early stages, and I just didn't hear much. I'm curious what you guys are doing with it or you're kind of sitting on the sidelines watching it? Nick Johnson: No, we're absolutely not sitting on the sidelines watching it, but to have a go at us, we're not shouting about it as much as we probably should be, and what we've found is that we are doing a huge amount of development in the background with AI. So we've already done some integrations into the platform with AI that haven't been released as full features into the platform. My understanding and the feedback that I'm getting from other CMSs that we talk to and have good relationships with are that AI at the moment; none of the big brands are quite ready to take the first step with it, really. They're all very interested in it, and it's a great opportunity to open a door and start a conversation with them. So we do have AI features built into the platform that can, you can walk up to a screen and tell it what your allergies are, and it can then relay what food is appropriate for you within that store or help you find products within certain aisles or find your preferences. So we're using it as a tool to really open up the door and demonstrate. But in reality, there's not been a huge amount of adoption from it on our side, and I think that it will come, but I think some of the big brands are just waiting for someone to take the first step to see if it goes well, and then there'll be a lot of people to follow, but we're absolutely in that talking point where we've done a lot of AI development. Yeah, I think, as you say, a lot of the work isn't really something that is going to be visible to an end-user or to a channel partner. It's work that helps expedite some basic coding and things, right?  Nick Johnson: Yeah, it's all about bringing in the data and feeding that back to the end user in the cleanest and most efficient manner. So it can become a very powerful tool, where we're seeing it. As I say, a great example would be to walk into a coffee shop and say, “I want something for breakfast, but I've got a nut allergy,” and it can relay all that allergy information and say, this is what we suggest, and if you say, “I don't want anything that has to meat in it,” it will say: here are the vegan options. “Where can I find that?” You can find that on aisle five, it's priced for 99 or whatever it might be. All of that is just pulling live data and using the AI tool to relay that information.  Just going back to ISE, I can't have this conversation without asking about the Rolls Royce. Nick Johnson: Yeah. So we had a lot of interest in a lot of questions about why you have got a Rolls Royce there, but I think that's it Dave. But I think for NowSignage and me, we like to get noticed and it's important to get noticed because it's, at times, a crowded marketplace, and I think you've really got to understand that there's a cost of being dull, and a lot of people waste a lot of energy and get drowned out by all this white noise because everyone's saying the same old, same really. So you've got to really consider what is the cost of being dull. And if you're going to be dull in the events industry, you're going to have an empty stand. You're going to have no pundits on your stand. You're going to be having no conversations. So, it's all about, I think, making people care, making people smile, and surprising them in some way, and if you can hit those three points at any point in any form of marketing, I think you'll get an interest in your sparking debates, really. So, for people who did not go to ISE, what did you do?  Nick Johnson: So we bought a 1950s vintage Rolls Royce from a scrap heap, and we did it over three months. My business partner is a fanatic about cars…  Yes, I met him.  Nick Johnson: He did it as a bit of a hobby, and before we renovated it, we, to some Rolls Royce lovers, they may not have been happy, but I remind them that it was on a scrap heap, so we did save it in the first place. Wwe chopped it in half, we attached a flatbed truck to it. We then constructed a digital scene on the back to make it look like it was a, like a food van, but actually it was constructed with screens and the digital element created a visual effect to make it look like the screens went up and down and then we drove it 1,300 miles from Manchester in the UK all the way to Barcelona at 50 miles an hour and parked it on the stand.  So, was it on the back of another truck, or was it a viable rolling vehicle?  Nick Johnson: So with this setup, and it was over seven meters long unit, so yeah, and because of the age of it, we actually built an electric motor inside it underneath. So what we did is we transported it on another vehicle that had to drive very slowly, and then when we got it near the venue, we actually drove it in with a remote control by the electric power. So we actually drove because no petrol was allowed in the car, and we remote control it in and reversed it onto the stand and then we had a few gags throughout the show as well, where we got people to sit in and then quickly remove the remote, and they thought that they'd pressed something and made the car move forward.  Well, that's certainly a lot more eye-grabbing than a bowl full of pens.  Nick Johnson: I agree.  So what are you going to do next year? Or you can't tell me?  Nick Johnson: I am under wraps on that one, but let's just say it's definitely going to be bigger and better. The problem that I think we will have once we do next year is that I'm not too sure how we're going to top it the following year. So, next year is going to be, yeah, pretty impressive. It is vehicle-related again, but yeah, it's even more impressive. I'm quite looking forward to getting it over there.  Yeah. Well, the challenge of that is just what you just said. If you one up by yourself every year, then there's an expectation now: what are you gonna do? Is it gonna be a space shuttle or what? Nick Johnson: Yeah, or just not turn up for any year or so, but I don't think we could do that.  Nick, thank you. That was terrific.  Nick Johnson: Excellent. Well, yeah, thanks for having me on, and yeah, I look forward to catching you in Infocomm or wherever I see you next.  Infocomm and I'll be at the event in Munich in six to seven weeks, something like that, so I'm around. Nick Johnson: Good stuff.  All right. Take care. 

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There is a lot of glass in public and commercial spaces, and the pro AV and digital signage industries have been applying all kinds of technologies to turn things like windows and dividers into part-time or full-time displays. In most cases, those jobs have come with compromises. There are films that might start curling at the corners, or discolouring. Mesh systems that look pretty good from the front, but terrible from the rear. And most recently, super-thin foils that need to be adhered to one side of glass panes. So what if the LED display was actually part of architectural-grade glass? That's the premise of a company called Clear Motion Glass - a Pennsylvania-based technology start-up that comes at the business from the angle of commercial glass. Clear Motion is a spin-out from William Penn Performance Glass, which has for many years been making and supplying laminated and tempered glass for commercial buildings. Unlike other products on the market, Clear Motion's LED displays are sandwiched inside sheets of laminated safety glass - so when a building goes up or is being retrofitted, the glass panels that go in are also active, highly-transparent displays. I had a good chat with Todd Stahl, a glass industry veteran who runs both the established and start-up businesses. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Todd, thank you for joining me.  Todd Stahl: Hey Dave. Yeah, I appreciate you having us on. It's going to be a pleasure to talk about some LED glass with you.  David: Yeah, tell me about the company. I saw you guys at DSE back in December. You were busy almost the whole time. So I didn't really have the time or the chance to have any kind of a detailed LED conversation, but I know that the company has not been around that long, but it's grown out of a pretty well-established “performance glass company.” Todd Stahl: Yeah. A little bit about the history there. So, at Clear Motion Glass, we're making the LEDs inside of the glass. I came across the LED glass around June of 2022, so I've had it for just about two years. The parent company is William Penn Performance Glass, and that's another company I started in 2011. We deal with high-end architectural Glass.  So, a cliffnote version: We go to the top architects in the country, and they're like, “Hey, who are you designing for?” And they'll say to us, “Hey, we want some really cool glass to go in the elevators for the Empire State Building.” So we got into the architectural space with glass, and actually, we'll William Penn, who was just voted one of the top 50 glass producers in North of North America. So something that we're definitely pretty proud of around here.  Then I came across LED glass around 2022, I thought it was one of the coolest things I've ever seen put inside a glass, and I wanted to be a part of it. David: So when you say you came across it, what do you mean by that?  Todd Stahl: So, there's another product in glass, another glass product that's been around, I'm going to say right around since 2000. It's a glass that goes frosted to clear from the turn of a switch, Switchable glass. So there's a company called Smart Film Blinds, and they were an applied film company that would actually take that, what we would call switch glass, but they just took the film and applied it to existing glass, and it was owned by Alan and Tracy Ackerman, and then they had this connection with LED Glass they weren't quite sure what to do with it. They knew it was really cool. And it had a chance to be really something big, but they were more of a film company, and then he and I got introduced, through a need that we had for some smart film, the switchable film, and then eventually we had a partnership for a while. Then we decided basically that I'll stick with the glass part, what I'm best at, and he'll stick with the film part, which was what they were best with. But that's how I got introduced to it, right around two years ago.  David: What you're marketing now is Clear Motion Glass. Is that your own product or are you reselling somebody else's manufactured product?  Todd Stahl: We have partners overseas, such as a company called Filmbase. That's where we get the actual LED grid or LED mesh. We bring that to my facility in York, Pennsylvania, which is in the south-central Pennsylvania area, we're 20 minutes south of Hershey, close to Harrisburg, and then we actually fabricate everything as a finished panel here. So we'll make the glass, we'll get the interlayer components. We have a laminating machine that actually works by pulling a vacuum and heating it up to certain temperatures. After that, it comes out, and we have a clear LED glass display.  David: So laminated glass is something that's been around forever. So this is just basically sandwiching the mesh in between sheets of laminated glass?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. We're definitely making a sandwich component. We start with a piece of glass, say that's your component number one. Then, we start with the inner layer materials.  In a case like this, we use a couple of different techniques, but we use EVA, which is ethyl vinyl acetate. Then we'll actually put the LED mesh grid on top of that, then we put another piece of EVA, then we go with the finished component of the sandwich, another piece of glass, and we stick them in an oven, we run a certain cycle, and about four hours later, we have a laminated piece of glass, exactly how you described. It's a sandwich makeup for sure.  David: Was there a lot of R&D work involved in it? Because I would imagine if you're putting an LED mesh inside of an oven, then going to a very high temperature and all that, I'm thinking if I didn't know much about this stuff, I'd be wondering, what's all that heat going to do to this thing? Todd Stahl: Yeah. You know, we have to make sure that it can withstand certain temperatures, obviously, and if you don't heat, and just in general, if you don't get laminated glass hot enough, it doesn't bond, it does not bond correctly. What you have to achieve is cross-linking and cross-linking is basically the interlayer material to the glass itself, and that happens at a temperature of around 110 degrees Celsius, so it's not getting hot enough to cook a Turkey in there, so we're not really dealing with extremes. I think a lot of people might think when you're actually making glass out of what we call a batch, you know that's where the glass is heated up to 2000 degrees and you're really dealing with some extreme temperatures. It's not quite the same extremes at all when you're dealing with laminated glass.  David: So tell me what performance glass is, and what high-end performance glass is because I don't know the glass world terribly well.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, sure. So, so what William Penn performance glass is the performance name kind of all started because our glass looks great and it, but it's an all safety rated glass. So that's kind of the performance part of the glass. So, if you're looking at our glass, say that's used for glass handrails, that's a very specific glass that's chosen to withstand the certain load requirements of a structural application, and typically most of our handrails are tempered, and laminated glass. So there are two ways on this planet to make a piece of glass safety-rated. You either temper it or you laminate it. We happen to do both of those things in a lot of our projects, and it's kind of funny like obviously safety-rated glass is strong, but the only thing that's really taken into consideration when you're referring to safety glass are you automatically assume it's going to break and what happens when it breaks, right? So with tempered glass, you put a lot of stress on the glass itself through a heating and cooling process, and whenever that glass breaks, it breaks into small panels that would not be able to potentially cause a life-threatening wound, and then you have the exact opposite with laminated where if a rock hits your car, if that's ever happened to you the rock doesn't come through and the pieces of the glass, the shards don't come through, they stay together. So you got those two things to the requirements when you're thinking about what is safety rated glass.  David: With the Clear Motion product, is it an indoor product only, an outdoor facing product, or what are the use cases?  Todd Stahl: So what's really cool about our LED glass is that almost wherever you're using architectural glass right now, you can now use our LED displays. So it can be used in exterior applications, a building facade, glass canopies, and railings that may be exterior. All of the components are kind of encapsulated inside that glass, and that glass is making a nice, really safe, cozy home for the LED display inside of it. David: And it's bright enough that it can be on a glass curtain wall like an auto dealer?  Todd Stahl: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the really cool applications for it. In fact, you had mentioned at the trade show and boy, were we busy? I think I was just talking about this yesterday. We scanned around 450 people in that short show. Our voices were a little strained by the end of the evening. So, the brightness of our display at the show, Dave, was only running around 4%, and I thought that was one of the more amazing things about the product because it was still kind of bright at 4%. Later we started bringing that up because a few potential clients wanted to see it at 50-60% brightness. So yeah, you can totally use this as an exterior sign and get whatever brightness you need. I think some of the products are well over 10,000 nits depending on the needs, and I think one actually lasted up to 15,000 nits, so plenty bright for the outside.  David: Yeah, once you get to 3,500, you're good.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, exactly. David: On transparency. I see on your website that it says there is up to 90 percent transparency.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, so when you get to some of the pixel pitches that are viewed from say, a distance of around a hundred feet, I think the pixel pitch at a 20, I believe that one may allow up to 90 percent of light to come through. It's really cool. I mean, you have this really great display, and then you're just getting all this, and you're not cutting off any spaces so if you have a traditional LED display, you can only view that from one side and I think that's kind of what's really amazing about this product and a lot of times when you're looking at the product, you don't even realize that it's transparent until the image would say it's rotating from one image to the next. And you're like, Oh, wow, that's clear, there are people behind there. So I think, yeah, it's really cool in that application.  David: From what I saw, because it's this mesh material, with super thin wiring in between each of the LED lights.  The challenge I've had with a lot of trans or “transparent products” is that they look good from the front side, particularly at a distance, but when you look at the back end of the things, there's a mesh, like a metallic mesh or something like that, a grid system that kind of makes it look like crap. Todd Stahl: Yeah. With a lot of the applied films that have been out there before, and there's not a whole lot of them, but there are a few, certainly from that backside, it doesn't look at all like the front, and the same thing, with the LED actual metal meshes, again, they look phenomenal from the front, and you get behind, and you're like, man, what am I looking at here? So with our product, what's really cool about that is you get a little bit of the halo effect, from the image that's playing on it, that you can see from, say, the view side of the glass, and then you get a slight reflection off of that front piece of glass that kind of bounces back through. So you see a little bit of a glow or a halo in the background, but it is not an eyesore, and it looks pretty good. You can see out, and you have a very clear picture of the people that you're looking through or whatever object you would be doing from the back of the product. It looks really good. It's a good look from the backside.  David: Yeah, there are numerous products out there that now do this kind of foil mesh effect, and you have to adhere it to the inside of a sheet of glass, which is all fine and everything else, but it doesn't look that good from the inside, does it? Todd Stahl: No, it really doesn't. The concept here, we touched on hockey a little bit, earlier, but you know, we have, you have all these hockey nets in the arena to protect the fans that a puck doesn't hit them, and most of those meshes are black. It's harder for our eyes to kind of pick up the black mesh than it is for white. There are some that have whites, but not many, and the black is blended in a lot easier. I'm a big hockey fan, so I've been to a few arenas, and the white ones are a little harder to, I think it takes away from the image more, and that's why we're using a black LED mesh.  When we first started, it was white, and it just didn't have as good of a; again, I thought it took away from the product from the backside.  David: So presumably there are limits in terms of the size of a glass panel that you can do because you've got a laminate in an oven of some kind and that they're only so big. So if you have, to use the example I mentioned earlier of, an auto dealer's glass curtain wall where the sheet of glass might be pretty darn big. How do you put multiple units together? And what does that look like in terms of cabling and everything?  Todd Stahl: Yeah. So we're always kind of limited in size by a couple of different things. Sometimes it might be the actual raw product glass that we're using. Some sheets are available to us, bigger and smaller, the width of the laminating materials, and then our oven as well. So basically, in our oven here in Pennsylvania, we can laminate an LED panel roughly about 6x10 feet. You know, that's a pretty sizable piece of glass, and then what we can do, if you're doing a glass facade it kind of gets into a little bit more of how the glass is installed, but you're basically stacking the panels. there's a control unit. That attaches to each panel of glass, and then those control units are all tied together and then that gives you one cohesive image plane from one panel to the next.  David: Do you have much of a seam in between them?  Todd Stahl: So, if you remember, at the trade show, I think we had two panels out there and we had a seam in the middle. So I'll see the seam, you'll see the seam, but when the image is playing, you really don't even notice it's there. A lot of times, depending on the application, a glass facade is a little different, because you're going to have all most likely all four edges of the glass covered, but, we have a lot of applications where the panels are being butt jointed together and it's a nice polished edge there. So, yeah, with the image running and stuff, you really don't even see it unless you get within a couple of feet of it.  David: So we're talking millimeters, not inches, in terms of a gap.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. You know, a gap's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of three, three-sixteenths of an inch, plus or minus. David: So not much at all.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, not much at all. Like I said, it's pretty cool. When that image is going, you're like, it just looks like one big piece of glass.  David: And there are technical limits, like if, let's say, an airport curtain wall that might be like 80 feet high for the side of a terminal or something like that. Can you do that?  Todd Stahl: Absolutely. That can all be tied in. You'd have several zones there, and depending on how you're handling the programming from a laptop, and something like that, you just say zone one's the entire thing, and then you might break it down into individual zones if you want different things playing at different times, but yeah, we this is definitely designed to do entire glass facades or, curtain walls. David: All those little lights generate some heat. How does the heat get out?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, so we've been working with these products for about two years now, and I always expect when I put my hand on the glass to touch it, that it's going to be nice and warm, but it really isn't. The heat definitely dissipates quickly. There is some energy consumption, and we have charts for that. So once we get into a building design, we can get in there and say, “Hey, this is what you're going to need for your power requirements.” But it has very similar power requirements to current LED displays that have been around for a while. But yeah, it doesn't really create much heat. You would think it creates more, and I'm telling you, whenever anybody sees it, one of the first things that they almost always do is, “Oh, I expected that to be warm” and they touch it, and it really isn't.  David: Well, one of the criticisms or let's say what a naysayer might say about this, is, “All right, if I buy this, glass panel with the LED mesh embedded inside of it, what happens if there's a dead pixel? I'm stuck with that forever. It can't be repaired because it's sandwiched in between two sheets of glass.”  Todd Stahl: You know, it was my biggest concern. We spent a good bit of time.  I think the lifespan of the LED bulbs we're using is right under 11 years. So we found the biggest problem that we've encountered, and this took us a while before we were going to bring it to market because that's by far the biggest concern; anyone looks at that and goes, it's not the first time I've ever seen a bulb, you know? So there's a couple of things. There's been a lot of research and development to make sure when it comes out of lamination that we've already caused any bulbs to fail before those processes, and we actually have a little bit of a protocol we've developed. So, one of the biggest reasons a light bulb is going to fail is the heat and pressure in that vacuum. It's not so much the heat, but the pressure because there's a little bit of movement in there. So if all those connection points aren't just right, you're going to get a bulb that may come out after you've done all of the work, and then you fire it up, and you know, there's a lot of bulbs, and a diode and only one is bad, it's not good. So we actually have a pre-laminating process we run to actually replicate what is going to go through the stressors of the lamination process. And if we find a bulb or a diode that might not be working, we can replace it after that pre-cycle of lamination.  Now, on the flip side, let's say it's out there, it's in the field. If we use annealed glass on the front surface, so, annealed is not tempered, but the backlight would be tempered, so you're still dealing with a, fully safety rated tempered and laminated makeup. We actually have a drilling process where we can drill a core out of the glass, and we can actually replace that LED diode. What our experience is that once they come through lamination so far, with all the panels we've been working on we have not had one go out and we've put them in some areas of our glass production facility near our tempering oven, which is a really cool piece of equipment. It has a 600 horsepower blower that when the tempered glass comes through, it cools it to dissipate the heat, but it draws some dust, there's some heat back there. We've had a panel running there for two years in that condition without any issues. But yes, you can actually replace the bulbs if you need to, if one goes out.  David: So I'm curious when an architect and a general contractor puts a building up, they're thinking in terms of being there for decades, with maybe the exception of football stadiums, which seem to need to be replaced every five years or so. Is 11 years an acceptable operating lifespan for a sheet of glass for a builder or for a building owner?  Todd Stahl: Yeah. I mean, our interlayers, they last 20-30 years. The interlayers and the glass products, yeah, they're going to last a very long time. When we've been bringing this product to market I think, the event back to the switch light is one of the first times you're us glass guys are introducing electricity into the mix. And at first that back in 2000, I mean, it was really cool. It had the wow factor, but it didn't quite last as long for me. I didn't really get into the product until recently. But you know, that product will last around 10 years as well, and we don't get a whole lot of callbacks very often with any of our glass products.  But it seems like most clients are happy with a 10-year usage. That's been pretty good for the Switch Lite product. We talk about a decade out there to the architects and designers now that, that's a number that they all seem to be very happy  David: Let's say a car dealer goes in, they're fine, they're thinking in terms of the glass that they put in is there for 10 years, and they may switch it out anyways?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, I think you know that everybody wants to be fresh and new. So we found a lot of these high-end retail stores that we've designed with, for instance, a high-end jewelry line, and let's say they have started in California with a new design. They take that design and they move it east to New York City. By the time they get to New York City, whether that's been five to eight years, and they redesign the whole thing over again. So there's a cycle and I think, especially with retail, and a lot of these buildings, they always want to have a new, fresh look, and I think a lot of times they're redesigning in under ten years for a lot of applications.  David: I'm guessing I could be wrong here, but I'm guessing that there's hyper-competition from China for, what I would say is conventional LED displays and so on; you're probably going to have less competition for what you're doing because of the sheer weight of, even if they can make glass cheaper over in China, shipping glass panels over here would be just ghastly expensive, right? Todd Stahl: Yeah, definitely. It's pretty heavy to air freight glass, so it's always nice that there's this thing called the ocean between us and China, especially us being we've been a manufacturer forever, and thankfully, it is a little expensive to ship a finished product like that and take some time. So, yeah, and you know, right now, we're kind of pretty far ahead of the curve in how to actually laminate this properly. Our feeling was when we got involved with this, all right, we got the LED technology. Now we'll just throw it in some glass, and we got a home run and it wasn't quite as easy to just throw it in glass and end up with a finished product, you know? There are still some areas. We are not the only ones in the world laminating this product, but there are, from what I know, under five; we're the only ones who can do it with thin and large panels. We're the only ones that I know of that are actually doing some of the very specific things to make sure it's going to perform properly in these laminated glass applications. In our process, we are patent protected in our process where I think we're just like in the first phase, I don't know all the legal terminology, but we're going through the patent process for the way we laminate it.  David: Which will help you over here, won't help you with Chinese products, but again, there's that ocean thing in between. Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. We have a few intellectual properties here and I'm not one to get into too many legal battles, but we would have some type of recourse if someone does come and is trying to laminate in a similar technique the way we do it. David: I suspect you're kind of looking around the corner as to where this is going and the types of technologies that are emerging. Do you kind of see this as, what you have right now is Gen 1, and over time the light emitters will get smaller, the wiring will be even thinner and so on? Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's exactly the way I see it going. I mentioned earlier: I really am a glass guy, and this is a glass company by people who absolutely love glass. Now, that's a Will Penn. Clear Motion, we have that same feeling as well, but this is more of a technology company. And what we're talking about today, like you said, generation one. We're going to revisit this in under five years, and it's going to look, I think, a whole lot different.  David: Who's buying it right now? And are you in the field with this?  Todd Stahl: So we're working on probably over 50 to 60 current projects right now in the design phase. Almost everyone we're working with has signed NDAs. So we can't necessarily say the clients that we're designing with right now. But one's a high-end fast food restaurant. They want one of these in each restaurant and that's actually for an exterior application.  David: Are these proposals or purchase orders?  Todd Stahl: They are proposals right now, so a lot of verbal commitments. We have a project we're working on in the Middle East in the design phase right now, that's 18 months out, the funding has been approved. They're designing it in the UK and then we're working with the audio visual company, I think in Texas. So this is really brand new.  David: You're in startup mode!  Todd Stahl: We really are, and this is the third company I've started literally from scratch, and I think it'll be the last one because boy, it is challenging. It takes a lot of energy. There's this great energy when you're starting it, and this is a little extra challenging because this is brand new. No one has ever seen clear LED glass displays like they just did not exist four years ago.  People might've thought they saw something similar. Like you said, it was a film or a grid that was put behind the glass. But when people are seeing this now, we're creating a new market, we're educating people to that market, and we're educating ourselves.  David: I'm guessing when people come to a stand at a trade show, you're at, the architects and the people who design physical spaces are the ones who are going, this is more like it. They haven't really liked the idea of films or foils and all that because of how they look at the back end or they're worried about a film sort of, particularly if it's exposed to UV light and all that, it's going to yellow and on and on…  Todd Stahl: So what the feedback from the A&D community has been? We did an AIA show in San Francisco last June, and we had one or two clients, say, “Hey Todd, we have the budget for this. We have clients who want this product, and we've been looking for it for years.” Then we start designing the project with them, and that's the thing: once I shake hands with an architect, we might not actually have that project begin production for 24 months to a year. So, depending if the building's coming out of the ground or if it's just a remodel of an existing one, it's a very long cycle until we actually get orders placed, and you know, something I've been dealing with for 30 years. It's kind of the way the industry is.  David: Infrastructure projects are never quick, are they?  Todd Stahl: No, they really aren't, but the A&D world is kind of our background. It's where we've been for a very long time in that space, and we've definitely noticed that companies, individuals in the audio-visual world respond to this entirely differently. This doesn't have as many questions in their minds. They're more educated because we've been used to dealing with LEDs for a very long period of time. So it's kind of interesting how the two markets work together, like the DSE show where we introduced the product, I would say more to the audio-visual world if I'm using the right terminology there, it was received just as with that much energy, a lot of more understanding right away, not as many technical questions. David: It's a variation on stuff they've been seen before, but maybe a better variation. Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely, and the architects, like you were saying, and even in general, I think even though LG makes an applied film. The North American President of, I forgot the gentleman's name, he was in my shop a little over a year ago, and we were working with his film, and then we showed him our LED glass, and he was blown away by it. David: “There goes my business”  Todd Stahl: Well, I think he was like, I'm going to make that too. I don't think he was worried about his business, but that applied film that they had been using, again, from a very long viewing distance, the product looks great. It's not yet ready to be viewed in shorter viewing distances, but the fact that it's applied, I do think that there is something like when you're buying a high-end product, you don't want people to be able to come up and pick it off, and I mean that definitely happens with every piece of film, I think I've ever worked with in my life. The first thing people do is take their fingernails, and they try to scrape the edge of it. It's just something that is instinctual about humans. But I think if you take that film now, I always say, if you put a piece of film on glass, it's just film. Once you laminate that film inside of the glass, you now have a glass product that protects it.  It does what you were saying. It prevents it from being yellowed over time because the inner layer blocks out almost 100 percent of the UV rays. So I think it's a great home for the LED mesh.  David: So does William Penn and Clear Motion Glass, do they operate separately, or are you kind of in the same office, the same building, and everything else, it's just different business cards? Todd Stahl: No, actually, we are in the same overall building complex, but we're not connected physically. So Clear Motion, basically has the equivalent of its own social security number, which down here in the business and for business, the IRS wants us to have EIN numbers for our businesses. So Clear Motion has an EIN number. Will Penn has an EIN number, obviously, but they definitely operate as two companies but obviously very close connections.  David: And you are running both?  Todd Stahl: I am running both right now, and spoiler alert: two's a lot harder to run than one.  David: Yes, I bet. If people want to find you online, they just go to ClearMotionGlass.com?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, that's it. They can find us there. There are some emails there. They can shoot an email to us and we'd love to talk to anybody if this product's right for them we're really excited about it and definitely creating a lot of energy with it. David: Are you at a trade show anytime soon?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, so we're doing Infocomm, I believe. It's the middle of June out in Vegas. Are you going to be there?  David: Yes.  Todd Stahl: Awesome, man. We get to meet in person, then. We'll carve out some time for that, Dave.  David: Absolutely, yeah, and that's a good show for you. There are tons of pro-AV people there. Todd Stahl: Yeah, I love that. That's a new space for us. So we're a little extra excited cause that's definitely not like a glass trade show is.  David: All right. Todd, thank you so much for your time.  Todd Stahl: All right. Yeah. I appreciate it, Dave. It was a pleasure.  

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Using data is pretty much integral to just about any ambitious and involved digital signage network being spun up these days, but for a lot of vendors and their customers, it's still a relatively new concept and approach. That's definitely not the case for the Toronto-area CMS software firm Omnivex, which has been around for more than 30 years and has always made data-driven communications central to what it does. More than 20 years ago, the core Omnivex solution included a module called DataPipe. I know, because I was using the thing way back then for a digital ad network I launched ... probably 10 years too early, but that's a story for another time. While a lot of its competitors have developed and marketed platforms that are pretty and loaded with bling, Omnivex has resolutely stuck to its technology guns with software that's quite involved and very powerful. The net result is Omnivex gets involved in a lot of the more complicated jobs in which real-time data, and the context it provides, shapes what shows up on screens. Airports, for example, are a very active vertical. I had a long, detailed chat with Neil Chatwood, a transplanted Brit who runs the global transport file for Omnivex. We could have gone on for hours, as he has a lot of insights about data, security, and programming content for large, very involved environments. Neil, thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know Omnivex, can you just give a quick rundown on the company?  Neil Chatwood: Yeah, for sure. So, Omnivex was established back in the dark ages of digital signage, 1991. It's a privately owned organization, just outside of Toronto, Ontario and Canada. Oh, come on. It's in Toronto. Like, Toronto goes on forever.  Neil Chatwood: Yeah, it's right. Pretty much right on the border. Well, it's on the subway line now. They've expanded the subway, so that finally happened.  Yeah, it's not like you see countryside on the other side of the parking lot though. Neil Chatwood: Not anymore. In the last 10 years, there's been a Vaughan skyline, as depressing as that may be. But yeah, I've been around a long time in a private family owned organization and it's really grown off the back of our focus on leveraging real time data, integrating with basically any system we could possibly think of. And that pedigree has kept us in the business for over 30 years now.  Yeah, I have a history in a network I started more than 20 years ago using Omnivex. So I was familiar with Omnivex products and datapipe and everything. So we were talking before we turned on the recording. I found it amusing that a lot of the software side of the industry has awakened to the idea of data integration and data handling for the last four or five years when it's something you were doing like 25 years ago.  Neil Chatwood: Yeah. Back in around 2009-2010 when a lot of the industry was yelling Content is King. Right. Don't say that.  Neil Chatwood: I know. You see. I do. Yeah, it's a classic. And our ownership at the time, you know, they like to have fun and they took that and changed it into Context as King and we've really kind of run with that since inception. But I joined the organization in 2010 and data and complexity is where we've always really hung our hat. We're a software vendor but the majority of our revenue comes from licensed sales. But we really do find ourselves in the trenches with our partners and our clients getting in there and providing pseudo consultancy on what data do you have in house?  Like, how has it been stored? What methods can we use? And figuring out the solution in parallel with all of the stakeholders, even though at the face of it we're just slinging CMS licenses. So that's our heritage and when I'm when I start talking to someone who's interested in looking at the market or you get a lead or you're talking to someone at a trade show, my advice is always to take a look at a bunch of companies. Take a bunch of companies, look at all these CMSs. In all the old guard, there's a good handful of companies that I might say some names, Navori, for example, StrataCash, Scala, right. They're all pretty old guard, when we talk about the digital signage industry.  I encourage people to take a look at all the products that are on the market and once you start to get those demos and you start to go through the sales process, you can really see the DNA of where that company's come from, right? Like, are they focused on a really pleasant UX/UI experience? Are they focused on performing high end post processing within the platform itself and are good at asset generation as opposed to creating it in a third party piece of kit and bringing it in. Our DNA has always been on the data side our position is that if you're going to make good images and assets that you're going to bring into the CMS, trying to ask a creative to use a tool, that's not something they're already comfortable with, you know you're kind of paddling upstream on that. So we've always taken the position of let people use the software that they're already comfortable with. Let's not introduce a knowledge gap, bring it in. And that leads us to, well, if we're not going to focus on the asset side, let's focus on the data side. So yeah, that's where we've come from. And it's where goals are set for in the future as well.  Well, when you have literally hundreds of software options out there these days and I would suspect most of them in some way say, yes, we do data handling, we have data integration, we have APIs or whatever it may be. How does an end user discern what's real versus just you the bare essentials? Neil Chatwood: That's a good question. When the user is going through that sales process and they're doing their comparisons, they have to show you it works right? Like, we're in an industry that is extremely visual, very creative. And you and I have been to a lot of trade shows and a lot of the DSEs in our time and if you're walking around there on setup day, I've seen plenty of CMS vendors running their showreel on windows media player, right. Before the crowds arrive and it's like, well if your stuff's that good, why are you using that? Like, why are you doing it that way? So if I was a buyer or if I was a third party consultant trying to guide someone through this, I'd be like the first couple of calls you're going to have with them. You're going to get the dog and pony show, right. They're going to show you all the sexy stuff, right? Oh yeah, all works great. Do you want to bring this plug in? Get your IT team involved, right? The people who know where your data lives and what format it's in, how accessible it is. And get them to sit down with the sales engineers of these CMS companies and get them to POC and get your data into their product, right? Most CMSs at this point, they're cloud hosting their software as a service, right? If they're sitting there and they're saying this is really easy. We can just go bing bong bop and it comes in, alright then show me. Just don't accept it at face value if you really want to dig into this stuff. I don't know any software vendor out there that isn't going to entertain the idea of a proof of concept or at least won't say, yeah, sure like any salesperson just wants to get the sale. Right.  So, if you've got this accessible data, right. Let's say it's up on Azure, right. It's some kind of blob storage or if it's accessible through an API. Can you just give me the keys? Like, let me in and I'll show you it in real time and then we'll bring it in. Once they can prove that to you, then it's not about data accessibility anymore. It's then you need to start looking into the assurances that they're going to be ethical and they're going to have the same levels of governance and control over that data that is being ingested into their system. That's where a lot of our focus is now. And you've really kind of touched on that with APIs. Back in the nineties, when we were asked to integrate with all these different data sources. We were lucky if there was documentation, it was probably RS232, serial cables.. David:That's a term I haven't heard in a long time. Neil Chatwood: Yeah. Using Telnet to get in. So like, a lot of the solution building was just kind of banging your head against the wall just to even access the data and make it legible to processing that data into information and then getting that information down onto the screen. That is less of a concern now because we're at the point where any data provider, they've probably got a fully or semi documented API or they've got an SDK, a software development kit where for the most part, if we're looking to POC a data integration. It probably takes us two to four hours, right? But based on how well documented it is, if the data structure is easy to work with and more often than not, the biggest part that takes the most time is liaising with the third party organization to let us in, right?  Because the client will say, Oh yeah.we use such and such for this and we're using this product for our bus timetables, our bus scheduling. Can you guys hit that? So it's like, well, there's a good chance we've already hit it because we've got clients there already but if we haven't, then we need to start up an engagement and start talking to that third party organization. This is the sticking point, right? Because when we start talking to that third party organization that controls that data, that the client is already paying for and leveraging it in house. Depending on the attitude and market position of that third party, they might not want to let us in, right? Like there's a bunch of organizations out there that sell digital signage as a value add, right? So, a good example of that would be, the historic vendors for flight information display systems, right? Screens in airports showing arrivals and departures. They sold data and the screen element was like, Oh, by the way, you probably want to show this on a screen, right? So we'll just sell you that too. It's a value add, it's not a true CMS. It's a point solution. So when we're engaging with that third party vendor, I'm often at the head end of this for transportation, I'm like, Hey, we're working on this project with a mutual client, they want us to get into your data. Is there any way you can provide a sandbox or some test keys so we can just prove this out? Depending on where they're at, they might not want to let us in. So, the sticking point becomes, then I have to go back to the client and say to the client, I don't wanna cause any friction here, but we can't get in without credentials and they're not giving us any. So can you please get involved? And those are the conversations where things start getting political. We're not looking to roll logs under our course friction anywhere. But as far as I'm concerned, your client's already paying for the data, right? Like if you know if you want to bolt on some charges for hey now you're using it for digital signage, so we want to charge you an extra 5k a year. That's on you. But as far as I'm concerned, an existing client is paying for the data, they want to use it this way. You're standing in the way of progress here. So, how do we deal with that? I spend so much time dealing with that now. And a reaction to that about five years ago, I started a scum works team internally. Here in order to proactively build data partnerships so that when a client says a key phrase, Everbridge is a good example, right. For mass emergency notification. So when a client says Everbridge, we don't have to go through an uncertain process of reaching out to someone we don't know, not knowing what their position is. It's like, we've actually already got this working somewhere else. We can get in here. I can show you an example of it already working or if you can give us access, we can actually prove it with your data. So that, yeah, that's the business. I just wanted to ask,  I've seen companies that talk in terms of what I call functionality apps so that they developed a data handshake with, as you said, Everbridge and then they sort of market that as an application, this is something that we can activate for you. Is that how you look at it? Or is that kind of a different angle?  Neil Chatwood: We look at it that way, conceptually because it's modularity, right? So, in our product, we're going to use a mechanism to reach out to that, that could be through some custom scripting or it could be within a product in our stable that has a full UI, in order to access that data. Like a good example would be, back in the day we had a via link for a via phone system. Right. So, that functionality that some organizations call them widgets, right. Where it's like, Hey, I just want to slot in this functionality. It's a couple of clicks. I put in my username, put in my password and away we go. We operate that in the backend of the system. But at this point, don't have a full kind of walkthrough where it's like, Hey, put in your Twitter username and password and away you go. Ours is a little bit more behind the curtain. We do it that way because we have user personalities. We actually used to use the Simpsons characters too, like, are we dealing with a bar? Are we dealing with Maggie? Like, who are we dealing with here? So those user profiles. It's like, you should be doing this, right? And if when we're looking at building out a data integration, that should really be set and forget it. There really is no reason to go in there on a regular basis and be changing that information or that query or the way we're massaging the data. So that is an administrative function, right? That is something that's behind the scenes. By virtue of that, we're probably dealing with someone who's a bit more technical, as a bit of an IT background. So, we have a relatively open system, right? So, whereas when we're dealing with widgets and a simplified user experience. Click this button, put username in, click this button, put your password and click this, or it comes on screen and now you can kind of like trim that down like that. That's what I've seen some CMSs do and I think that's a really light low friction way to get that data in there. We take the approach of like we're a toolkit. We're going to assume that our users and our clients and our channel are matching our products and our toolkit to the right levels of user. So, in the backend, it's like, here's a fully open interface that you can do whatever the heck you want with, we can give you some foundational building blocks or modules to enable and empower that user to take it where they want to take it. And that speaks to kind of one of our other positions in the industry where anyone who's been around kind of knows that Omnivex deals with relatively complex situations because we've got that wide open back end that frankly is quite and is a bit scary, right? To a user that just wants to change a welcome board or change some numbers that are on a restaurant board. So that's really not our target market, right? Our target market is predominantly enterprise level. They've got an in-house IT team or they've got a good system integrator involved where we can really get into the weeds on what data you have. Data has a cost, right? Well organizations are paying to cultivate it, gather it, store it in house. How do we make that data actionable by adding incremental value to it? That's what we're looking for. So when we go into a situation, we want to find those people, those stakeholders within the end client and within our channel to get into those deeper discussions on like, I know you want to point an arrow to the right but if we look at what data you've got in house, like, let's say, modern elevator system or a modern escalator system where we're able to tie into the back end of, Hey, on a Monday, this elevator serves floors 8 through 12.  But, on weekends or on bank holidays, that elevator is completely shut off. Then, I probably don't want that arrow to go right, when that elevator is offline. I want it to point straight ahead like a zero degrees rotation, right? Instead of 90 degrees rotation. So if we don't have an awareness of what data the client has and the client doesn't have the kind of persona or has the team in house that knows, how their systems work and how their architecture and what data they have, then they might not be the best fit for the kind of challenges we're looking to tackle. You're doing a lot more than changing a price or a soup of the day.  Neil Chatwood: Yeah, that's the table stakes, right? I mean honestly, it's a bad word in our industry, but If you really want it to go down, PowerPoint is able to do that now. Like you can integrate PowerPoint with Excel. So I know, ever since I've been in the industry, you're always kind of one step away from someone saying, well, why wouldn't I just use PowerPoint for that? It's like, well, you're missing a whole bunch of functionality on top of it. But fundamentally, any CMS worth its salt has two core elements that it needs to play with. It needs to play with data and it needs to bring in assets and basically import those two elements into a layout, right? So by that definition, can PowerPoint do it? Yeah, If we really boil it down but there's so much value on top of any of these systems. But getting to that data, exploring the data with the clients is where our ROI comes in and that's a scary term for a lot of people in this industry too. I honestly think digital signage was really looking for ROI metrics for what feels like 20 years, we were really struggling. We only really started to get metrics around that in certain fields. Right. So it's really easy to establish ROI when we've got a camera pointed to the audience, we're looking at expressions and demographics and we're triggering it and we're detecting when eyeballs are looking this way. So ROI on that is really easy. You want me to give you ROI on a wayfinding arrow changing from zero degrees to 90 degrees. That's going to be a bit more obfuscated but maybe you're going to see that down the road when you have an independent audit on your facility and your KPIs go shifted five points because your space is a lot more usable now. So, adding incremental value on that data is really what we're looking to do and you mentioned menu boards. Menu boards are a real quick win. It's very transparent, the value of that is very clear but when we start to talk around, passengers flow around an airport or like nudge theory, convincing people to move one way instead of another way because that benefits the operations of the environment. That is a little bit more tricky to prove ROI on but the humans walking around that space are going to have less friction and less stress while they're in there. But it really all comes down to weaponizing the data like how do we get the most out of it? How do we turn data into information?  I could ask a bunch of questions but we probably talked for about three hours. I'm curious about a big job that you were directly involved in and Omnivex was obviously directly involved in at Minneapolis airport which is considered one of the better airports on the planet now. What's all involved there? Because there's a lot of data handling and a lot more going on than just saying that the flight to Seattle is at gate 47.  Neil Chatwood: Yeah, there is a lot going on at MSP and just to give them a quick shout out, MSP just won the best airport in North America for the third year running. I think that came out a couple of days back and I think they've won it like seven times out of the last eight years. So, they've got a dedicated team in house that takes care of this stuff. And I really want to focus on not Omnivex for a second here because the airport deserves to be called out here and so do us. We've got a system integrator in there called radiant technology as well out of Columbus, Ohio. And the success there has really started with the vision of their CIO, Eduardo Valencia. He was directly inspired by sports stadiums, right? And he was personally quite frustrated when he went to a sports stadium. How come the puck goes in the net, the whole stadium changes color and everything goes whiz bang and all of a sudden I'm being advertised, Coca Cola and like why do my screens in my airport suck? But I'm able to see this when I go to a hockey game. So there's got it. So he used certain mechanisms to figure out what's going on in the industry and who's able to power these full experiences within a facility and thankfully led him to us. So it really started with that frustration and they took a strategic view at the airport where you'll hear Eduardo talk about it. The entire airport should just be treated as a single pane of glass and I should be able to control any screen in the airport any way that I want which is a great ambition and a lot of facilities, it's not just airports. A lot of facilities have a similar ambition and it's very easy to start with that dream but it's not going to happen unless you align resources in house. So, MSP have their own decision making panel for digital signage.  They've got a group in house that is responsible for pushing this forward. Nothing good, nothing worthwhile, nothing award winning happens by accident. Like, they've taken a real pragmatic approach to this. So, they took a look at their screen estate. They took a look at the use cases. They took a look at that data and they engaged that system integrator as I mentioned, Radiant to like all right, how do we make good on all this stuff? So, it started from the top which kept teams engaged. It kept them focused and that's why this is a success. So, a part of that with a foundational piece of technology in there. But we're really just a toolkit and it speaks to what I mentioned before about, Hey, our backend might be a little bit scary but you can do whatever the heck you want. That's the power of a toolkit. So, to go back to what you mentioned about that widget and that usability you can have a really like turbo linear workflow but that really hamstrings capabilities, right? So when you're making a product, you've got to decide which way you want to go?  Do I want to go a mile wide? And an inch deep or do I want to go real deep where the scary stuff lives? That's where we typically are. Where were the, you know, where were the angler fish? So, that was MSPs approach and that example I mentioned was about what the elevators are doing, what the escalators are doing. What's happening operationally right now within my airport. So that's where you start. Like what's happening right now. Okay. So what's happening now? Well, Delta airlines have these check-in counters open. So well, I know my building, I know where the check-in counters are. So the screens that are directly parallel at the curbside to those check-in counters, then let the people pulling up in their cars know, Hey, if you want to go Delta, there's a big Delta logo and it says open underneath it. Okay. Particularly airports that are dynamically assigning check in counters for smaller airlines, right?  Neil Chatwood: For sure. Yeah. Multi-use, environment. So, when we're, yeah. So there's always going to be situations where like, Oh yeah, that terminal that's United terminal, right? So like, there's no real variance there, but there's a whole bunch of smaller airlines and they call it common use. So, yeah. So, you know, we've got systems where, you know, let's say, you know, a smaller airline, you know, logs in like, you know, one example could be Flair. I don't, it's not around anymore. Right. But flair could log in. Okay. Well, they've only got two flights a day but they need to take over the ticket counter, they need to take over this gate temporarily. So when they log into the common use platform which is what's on those screens in front of those agents. When they log into that common use platform by virtue of them logging in, I know who they are, right? And I know that they work for Flare. So now it makes sense to change the screens that are physically behind that desk. Put up the default content for Flare right now because until this agent makes some decisions around, this screen is going to be the backdrop. This screen is going to be a priority checking or whatever. Maybe we just want to highlight that this is Flare's house now and then as they go through their login procedure the screens can be set up any way that they like and what we can do is we can provide dashboards and linear use case tools that makes it easy for that user. That's where things should be easy where someone's interacting with digital signage as this is not their job. Like their job is to make sure that they're processing passengers and getting them to where they need to be. There might be really high turnover. They have no interest or time to be trained on how to use a content management product. So it's like, look at that requirement. So what do I need to do? I probably need to present the screens that are behind them, I need to present to them the assets that are available to them and I need them to highlight which flight that they care about right now, that could all be manual. So, their experience is like, okay, I'm Neil, I've logged in, I'm at Flare, bang, screens change. Okay, I've got four screens behind me, what do you want on each one of these screens? I want to do image one, image three and image five. Instantly goes up on the screens behind them. All right, I'm done. So that's where it's really important to reduce that friction and make it easy. Not necessarily when we're setting up the data flow because again, I'm only really going to be setting up that data flow once and then maybe changing it when upstream data sources change. That experience for that airline agent, that is multiple times a day. That's where we need it to be frictionless, not on the data integration side. I think it's interesting with airports and other large footprint facilities like mass transport hubs, stadiums, multi use areas where there's a stadium, restaurants, residential, commercial on and on and on and airports in particular, I kind of see two threads to how experience works. I see these gorgeous, very ambitious, very expensive, digital art installations and giant LED walls in newly built airports and they talk about the experience of that and how people are going to feel good about flying and so on. But I see this whole other side and it is much more what you're talking about. A great experience in an airport is not being panicked, not being lost, not being delayed, not knowing where things are, all that sort of stuff. To me, that's a far more important experience, is that kind of how you see it and how some of your clients see it?  Neil Chatwood: There's a few hats I could wear on this. The first hat I'll wear is someone who wants to sell as many licenses as possible. I would rather they have a thousand flat panel screens, right. But that's not where the industry's going. Right. And the big reason for that is, we as an industry, we've watched the price of DV LEDs really just go through the floor to the point where there's real comparisons where it's like, is this a parity with like a 55 inch flat panel now For me to get a DVD, like a modular DVLED the same price. So that's a huge part of it. It's like the cost has finally come down to a point where it's reasonable at scale but a lot of it is also just straight up hype, right? Like airports, like anyone else have to sell and compete with other airports. And this is something that you don't really think about until you get into it but when you've got two airports that are within an hour's drive of each other. They're not only competing for passengers, they're competing for the airlines.  Yeah.  Neil Chatwood: Right? So it's like, If I'm courting with the idea of trying to bring a major airline two that are right next to each other but a good comparison would be like SFO in Oakland, right? So it's like, okay well, if I'm in Oakland, how do I convince people not to go over the bridge to SFO? I'd probably need the carriers that carry the most passengers.  San Jose? Neil Chatwood: Oh yeah. Good example. Yeah. So a lot of these big sexy installations are coming from, you've got to keep up with the Joneses. But also the price of DVLEDs is reasonable now. So there is that part of the market where it's all about the LinkedIn posts and the marketing and the wow factor. Yeah, you're exactly right. So there'll be like a handful of those within an airport, right? Like a good example would be, Nashville. We worked on a project with Nashville airport and the content that provided for that was, Gentle Home out of Montreal, where they all are. So, they provided that in an awesome job but that is just one. It's essentially two screens in probably in a state of, I think about 800 or so,  Something like that. Neil Chatwood: So, the big glitzy installations are now basically a requirement for any new build or any renovation for any airport. There's a couple of projects that I'm aware of that are really interesting. But in terms of decision making, like when I come back down to the fundamental goal of signage in general, not just digital, is to convey information quickly and clearly guide decision making in an environment. Is this generative AI artwork doing that? No, it's not going to help me get some flight on time but it might bring down my blood pressure a little bit, that's what these art installations are, right?  Like they're looking for an opportunity for facilities to express themselves, reinforce their branding, market the local area but also sell advertising which is a huge driving factor on some of these big installations too. So, there's very much like, let's call them the anchors, right? Like they're the anchor installations now where there's millions and millions of dollars being spent and then it's why I've always kind of enjoyed your outlook and your material Dave is like, the boring stuff and that's what I'm into as well and when I'm walking around the world. That's the stuff that I'm like, Oh, that is cool as hell. One of the best bits of boring signage at MSP is that good design is invisible, right? So, there is an underground walkway. It's not a walkway. It's more like a hallway but it's very much a liminal space and you're going under there. I'm trying to imagine putting my hand up. It's probably about 10 feet tall. So it's like, well, there's not much opportunity for overhead signage cause we can only really add probably about eight inches to this, like overhead. So, that team works with a display vendor and they put in, I think it's roughly around it's about a hundred or so feet wide. I know I'm probably over, I get it. It's probably about 80 feet wide. But 80 feet wide by about seven inches high.  So number one, okay, well, we're still compliant with safety and we've got this screen in this hallway now. What's great about it is it's pure wayfinding. All it does is just show people where they need to go. But upstream of this, like this very boring sign is I would estimate two and a half thousand data points. Yeah. In order to get the arrow point in the right way showing, Oh, you're looking for this airline or you're looking for a route with accessibility or you're looking for the TSA. When you add together the time to get to the queue, plus the queue time, which way should you go? What condition are the elevators in? What condition are the escalators in? Where as an airport, do I want to drive people right now, based on what's going on in my space? All that intelligence is above that sign, logically. But as a passenger, I look at it and I'm like, Oh yeah, I'm going with Air Canada today. Bump, I'm done. But the solution is so complex behind it but ultimately, it just means, Hey, this logo appears on screen and this arrow is at 220 degrees and that boils down to that. And I think that use case is beautiful like simplicity in design, it gets rid of the friction. It gets people where they need to be. That's what we're in this business for.  But the bottom line on that is it looks simple to the end user, to the observer, but there's a lot going on behind the curtains to make that work seamless.  Neil Chatwood: Yeah. Again, good design is invisible, right? Like you would have no idea the complexity that goes on with that screen. Like I said, we could talk for a very long time but we're already running longer than I usually do. So I got to wind this down, Neil, this has been great.  Neil Chatwood: Thanks, Dave. Omnivex has been around for a long time. I've been around a long time. You've been around a long time. I'm surprised we've not get to this earlier but thanks so much. I really respect Sixteen Nine and what you've done for the industry. And I encourage you to keep at it. We need a rational voice in this craziness.  All right. Well, thanks. Thanks again.  Neil Chatwood: All right. Thanks a lot, Dave. Take care.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The people behind college and pro sports have increasingly focused on making events multimedia experiences that start well before fans put their bums in seats, and we're now starting to see hints of that in the way public spaces are programmed. Screens are sync'd, and content is carefully timed and triggered based on data and all kinds of variables. While most integrators and solutions providers are focused on executing on ideas and needs, the New York company ANC has for years being delivering services and software for what it calls branded entertainment. The work started with collegiate and professional sports, but more recently the company has branched into areas like retail and mass transportation - including the multi-venue, many screens experience that stretches between the Fulton Center in Lower Manhattan and underground to the World Trade Center complex. I had a great chat with Joe Occhipinti, ANC's Chief Operating Officer. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Hey Joe, thank you for joining me. I've chatted with ANC in the past with Mark Stross but that's going back like six years or something like that. I'm curious, first of all, what your company does and maybe we could get into a little bit about the background of basically buying the company back from prior owners that started as a family company and now it's going back as a family-driven company, right? Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great.  Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great.  It was a good five or six year run we had with them. And I was with the ANC for a lot of those years. I started back in 2012. So I saw the end of Jerry's initial ownership and then into the Learfield, and then I kind of parted ways with ANC in early 2022 and found my way into a company called C10 with Jerry's son, Jerry Cifarelli Jr. and shortly into 2022, Learfield reached out to us and was interested about looking into a potential acquisition and I think Learfield's business has changed a lot, right? Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great.  They were in multimedia rights and they've kind of shifted into a data-driven company with all their fans and engagement and I don't think it was core to them any longer and obviously with Jerry's father, having started the business, it was very near and dear to our hearts. We felt that ANC had all the right foundation but due to its success over 25 years, we can kind of take it back and change a few things, get the parts back together, streamline things, and get after it once again to bring the band back together. And that all happened in early 2023. We couldn't be happier to kind of be driving the boat again.  David: So, anybody if you meet at a cocktail party or a neighborhood party or whatever, says, what do you do? And more to the point, what does your company do? What do you tell them? Because it's quite involved. Joe Occhipinti: The loaded question. Hopefully they have like two drinks like one in each hand or something. But basically, the ANC consists of four business lines, we like to call it. So, the kind of the moneymaker, the thing that gets the most press is LED Technology installations and that could be the things that catch everyone's attention is obviously the large format LED displays but we're really a technology integrator, throughout the entire venue. So we have installed IPTV, we've installed TVs, we've installed full control rooms, things of that nature. And those are the apps which have a large format. I keep going back to that but the main video center hungs and arenas, center field boards and baseball. We have a 280 foot display at Westfield world trade center. Some of those marquee kinds of displays that you guys have heard and seen. Then we also have a services department or venue solutions we like to call it. After which all the pretty lights go up, we have to then maintain it and make sure it works for the life of that display or until the next renovation happens. So we actually have a fleet of operators out in the field who are going on pregame off days and making sure that modules are fixed and things are corrected. The proper content's loaded into the software and they're ready for the game presentation or for the next event or for the next change in scheduled content that's going to happen in an out of home venue. So we do a ton of that as well and then we also have our ad agency business. So that goes back to when Jerry started the whole business of TV visible signage, where we are acquiring inventory from teams that we work with or we go out and purchase it and then we also represent brands. So we'll place a discount tire behind home plate at a specific market that they would like to see or a number of different advertisers that we've been working with for years that really want to have that TV visible signage in sports our ad agency is mostly on the sports side we do some and out of home but obviously those are kind of owned by the properties and things like that so it's a little bit different and then what ties it all together is our software business. So It's called LiveSync now. It started as FasciaSoft, VisionSoft, VSoft and now it's LiveSync and it's all in the name. We specialize in syncing all your displays throughout the venue. So, somewhere like Westfield World Trade and Fulton Center, they're kind of one venue to put together. I think they have upwards of 75 or 80 displays between LCDs and LEDs and we have a constant stream of scheduled content. That's looping every 10 or 20 seconds 24*7 and you can sit there and watch in one area 5 to 10 displays all changing at the same exact time, frame to frame, everything running pixel to pixel. But the beautiful thing about live sync is what it does is we're wide open, open API, open source. If you want to play ball with everybody else that might be in the control room and we want to be able to trigger whatever else you might want to trigger with that piece of content. So if you wanted to run a home run graphic at Fenway park and you want to get your LED lights for a night game to flicker, you know when the guys around the bases. ANC Live Sync can trigger that software and it can all run synced and simultaneously. So, we really like to say that we can be the quarterback of the venue like somewhere like Wells Fargo Center. We trigger an IPTV program to have a goal animation run in the suites over whatever TV broadcast is being shown.  So, we've really come a long way in that regard. The software has come. Leaps and bounds, probably even from six years ago when you talk to Mark and we're really proud of the software that he's developed with his team. David: And this is your own software. It's not something you sell, right? It's software that you use when you're working with various customer venues.  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. A lot of times our software is installed when we are doing the full install. Right. We don't really sell it out of cart. We have started to look into that, right? Like we think the software is at a point where it can do that and can be that. We did a deployment this year at I think it's PPG paints arena at Pittsburgh Penguins where another LED manufacturer got the LED job but they came to us for the software. So that was just a software standalone installation where we went in there into the control room and installed the servers and had it integrate with everything else they had there and it runs their live game presentation now. David: Right and when you're talking about being known for LED or being known for LED display control and so on but you're not a manufacturer or reseller of somebody else's product, right?  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, we're not a manufacturer at all. So we do have competitors in this space, right? You know, big name, LED installers but they're all manufacturers. So, even though we were competitors, we're kind of not, you know what I mean? Like you can see a world where we can come together with some of these and enhance their business. Right. We feel that we can do a good job on the installation side and on the service side. But we really talk to the clients and figure out what they need from the LED signage perspective and we go out and find the best possible product to deliver that.  And then we'd like to use our four business lines to create a cohesive partnership with that client. So, once we're in a venue and they want to add a display here and there. It's very easy to add it into our existing licensing software or to add it to our services. Right? So, we like to use or give the partner back ad dollars by finding somebody to buy advertisements on their home plate or elsewhere in the venue. So, we really can use our different lines to be a full service partner for all of our clients.  David: It's interesting. Years ago, I remember talking to somebody about shopping malls and how shopping malls, particularly in Asia, were no longer just seen as warehouses or Harmonized venues for retail. They were experiential places that were programmed and that had like programming calendars and special events and everything else related to it and it kind of sounds like what you're doing and what you can deliver is you're really programming a venue or in the case of down by the World Trade Center, multiple venues so that content cascades across them things happen and so on, but it's all kind of cohesive as opposed to maybe more traditional digital signage and just display work where there's something driving this, there's something else driving that maybe they once in a while sync up but they're not really working together.  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, I agree. I think these are all becoming everyone's fighting to get the people to their venue, right? I mean they want to drive sales or drive concessions or whatever it might be. And the malls are becoming more of let's go spend a few hours at the mall. I mean let's not just go pick up something I need, right? It's like, let's do this with the kids or see this special event or whatever it might be. And being able to create an atmosphere that's inviting and appealing to people's eyes kind of goes hand in hand with that. And then obviously you can promote the upcoming events and whatnot too. Right. So there's just more and more digital installations happening and the interesting thing that we're seeing in the business and it's happening in sports as well.  I mentioned Jerry Cifarelli Sr started with rotational signs like static banners behind home plate and on ribbons and that grew into LED behind home plate and then LEDs on Ravenstein, these massive center hongs. But now these at home venues and these sport venues are now expanding, right? You have these big conglomerates businesses that are doing stuff outside beyond just the stadium, right? Trying to get people there before the games and to the restaurants and to the bars and you're seeing digital marquee that you would typically see on the highway, kind of up on the back of a stadium or down the street at the bar that they just built, that's owned by the same kind of marketing company that owns the business or has similar interests. So, if they are kind of meshing a lot and they're all trying to fight for those eyeballs and fight for those people to bring the dollars and revenue in their way.  David: Yeah, it kind of seems like the worlds are converging, when I was reviewing your company website and seeing how deep a background you have in sports, both college and pro. And expanding into retail and in public spaces like mass transport and so on and thinking at first that well these are very different worlds but when you really think about it they're very similar worlds in a lot of ways these days because like airports are shopping malls and sports venues are no longer just the arena,  It's the multi purpose sort of event area with retail and residential and hotel and everything else and it's all being driven by the same developer or developer group. So they are harmonizing all this stuff.  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, that's exactly right. And we're here to help. Whatever those entities are to create a cohesive appeal to the entire look. And then what's happening too is a lot of our venues are old, right? Our malls are a little older, our stadiums are getting older. So you're going to see more of these stadiums, new builds will happen but you're going to see a lot of renovations where there's going to be seating upgrades and there's going to be changes to potential sight lines and things of that nature and make egress and easier and more exits whatever it might be. But the technology is really what's going to put the renovations over the edge and it used to be that once you walked through that little tunnel and saw the baseball diamond, the first LED you saw that day was then. Now it's like when you're a couple of miles away on the highway, you see a billboard that's on the stadium. So right away, you're triggering people's eyeballs before they even get to the park. Then you're tailgating and you're seeing advertisements run in your face and then you scan your ticket and you see an LED when you go through the lobby and the concessions and things like that, those can be obviously monetizable and you can have advertisements there. And the same things happening in malls and in transit hubs and in other places where they're trying to grab your attention before you even think about heading into that wherever you're at, wherever you're going.  David: Do you have to sell this whole notion into these kinds of venues or do they just inherently get it now because they've seen it in action elsewhere and it's no longer just this sort of exotic concept? Joe Occhipinti: They definitely have seen it and they want to do it. I think where we come in is kind of helping them bring that to life. So we actually have like an architectural designer that will go and meet with teams and say, Hey, we have this area of our club or of our mall or transit hub that we'd really love to be able to monetize and put some LED signage here but we don't really know how to do it. So that's where we come in, I would say we consult them but we're really just trying to provide another service to an existing partner or potential partner to say, Hey, we'll take some pictures, we'll create a virtual world and we'll throw some LEDs on there and you guys can kind of see and understand what it might look like. And how do we angle it right to catch the attention of people coming up the stairs so that whatever it might be. So you can maximize the eyeballs and the dollars that you would get from that, right? Or the feel or the presentation that you want there. So we're doing that constantly. We have done that at a lot of our marquee venues where we start with one install and the next thing you know is there's three or four or five installs over the next five or six years where they're adding a screen here or there because they realize it's a high traffic area or during walkthroughs or tours. It's a good place to promote their upcoming events or whatever it might be, you know what I mean? So we kind of do that a lot for our places just to allow them to continue to add to the technology and to provide a better presentation to their constituents that are at the venue.  David: Is it just the highly visible stuff? In the case of, let's say, a sports and events center, are you also driving the menu boards, menu displays in concession and the ticket windows and things like that? Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, we've done some of that. As I mentioned, Wells Fargo is like our, I don't want to say crown jewel but it's been a really great partner for us for I believe over a decade. And we literally do everything there from, they have a sports book lounge on their top level to where they were ingesting staff feeds and scores and betting lines, their main video screen is kind of kinetic. It comes down at one size and opens another and we just have to hit one button in our software which allows it to do that and then their IPTV system. I think it's upwards of 700 LCD or TV displays that they have across the venue and we don't have our own IPTV software but we built a bridge between us and their IPTV providers so that when they do score a goal or there is a win, we can send graphics out there. Or if something they want to promote to their suites or to certain areas of the business of the venue, I should say, we can do that. Or even emergent emergency messaging or something like that. We have the ability to go full blast on every display that we touch that's in there. And then even still, they're even adding more, we have billboards out on 95 there in Philly. They added some more displays on their outside, where if you go to a flyers game tomorrow, you'll see us up there kind of installing it. So, like I said, they're trying to get you from when you're a few miles away to get you thinking, you know, I'm excited for this game and I'm excited to participate in this event but also what goes out on there, you alluded to that. I kind of said the betting lines and things like that. But one of our venues we have in the city, we have two JP Morgan Chase banks and you think that's kind of like a sleepy thing like who's going there to see the LED. But what Chase does for their customers is while you're sitting there, you might see If there are any subway delays, we work with the MTA to ensure that you'll see any traffic it might be if you're heading to Queens and say, it'll say take the tunnel not the bridge or whatever it is. Right. And whether we'll pop up. So yeah, we're not creating this data but we're ingesting it from different feeds and from different sources and we're making it pretty, we're creating the graphical ways that it might show up and kind of add to the person's experience being at whatever venue they're at.  David: Right. Now if I talk to virtually any CMS software company out there these days  and I asked them about data integration, they'll say, of course, yeah we do all kinds of  data handling. We've got APIs and this and that where we're all over that stuff but I get the impression that there are very much different kind of tiers of this that you can have kind of basic data integration that yes, you could query, let's say some transit data if it's publicly available as an XML feed or something. From what you're telling me, this is quite a bit more exotic than that. Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, I believe it is. I mean, I think what we can do is if the weather variable says it's going to be cloudy, we create a graphical thing that shows what you would think would be cloudy and that shows up there, right? Or if when it's time for the weather to come through and it's sunny, the background will say 65 and it'll be sunny but if it's 65 and rainy, the background will have rain on it. So we're even going to that level where what the trigger is we're not just spitting out what the variable is but we're trying to create a cohesive content experience too, that kind of shows what's happening and then it allows us to trigger different items in our software too that if we can automatically change when the variable goes from top one to bottom one, it automatically changes the advertisements that would run in that happening. So it even comes with efficiencies on our end of what we're able to and how we're able to gain presentation and things of that nature. But yeah, I mean these are little subtle things that the customer or the fan really appreciates and it's just great for us that we have an in-house design team. We recreate these things, we're then our statistical engineers and our developers are then creating ways for it all to work together. So yeah, you do have your base level where we just want to see the scores on a ticker which we're happy to do but if they want to get more involved and do some more graphical things to enhance the experience, we're obviously able to do that as well. David: When it comes to things like game day experiences for big sports venues and multi purpose venues like that, do these organizations have their own teams that handle all that and they just kind of work with you or are you actually doing the game day experience for these companies? Joe Occhipinti: It's different at every venue. We're happy to be part of the team. However they would like us to be. It goes anywhere from a place like the game bridge field house, right? They just hosted the all star game and we live sync touches every LED display that's permanently installed there. And our operators heavily involved in production meetings need to understand what the run of the show is to load the content prior to the game. He's been there so long. I'm sure maybe he will make some say, Hey, maybe try this or that. I don't know but he's been there for a while. He's great at what he does and they fully trust us to carry out the run of shows that they have created but what might be in that run of show or graphics that the in-house design team also creates. So that's kind of part of the services department that I mentioned before, we also have graphic designers in house that if they want a special intro or some graphical element for a camera like a kiss cam or something. These keys and things that you see that help with game press, we kind of create those things for them. And our guys are downloading it, testing it, making sure that it works for the game when it inevitably runs in the game. So it is varying levels somewhere passive, right? We're like, Hey, we're here, let us know what you need us to do. Let us know what content needs to be run. And then in others where we're heavily involved where we're talking to them twice a week on content and churning out thousands of hours of graphical design and in their production meetings and we're upgrading their stat layers every season and creating a new look that might go with their season tickets or whatever it might be. Right. So they would kind of like to have that whole cohesive kind of brand. Brand look that they go for. So it does vary per client just based on your level with them and what they want to get out of the relationship.  David: Your company background is much more in sports but as we mentioned earlier, you kind of branched into retail and mass transport and other kinds of things like that. How does the business break down now? Is it still predominantly sports or are you seeing quite a bit of traction in these newer areas?  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. I mean, obviously the legacy business, it used to be ANC sports and we dropped the sports when we started to foray into other things, the at home kind of markets. I would say we do more volume and on the support side but there's obviously a lot of growth and a lot of greenfield on the place we call it places are out of the home side. And we've been lucky enough to do some impressive installations where the clients have trusted us to perform those, even though we had a lack of experience in it. I've mentioned Fulton and Westfield, that was our first foray into it and was a hit and it looks great and still looks great, seven eight nine years later. We did a really good install down in South street seaport which we believe is really impressive. We did some stuff at Moynihan train hall. So we've been lucky to have some big marquee type installations. We are trying to build our relationships with a lot of the out of home players without naming any names. Like we were trying to build those relationships and just kind of see what the partnerships look like there and be an installer and integrator for them as well, just like we've been able to do in the sports.  So, I think the numbers will probably say that we're still more of a sports type business. But I don't think it's that far off from being even one day and I think we are going to put some resources behind it and we're going to do some stuff with the software that will help us change. We are in the process  of changing our user interface to be a little bit easier to use. We're doing some cloud type and quick play type stuff at NBC Universal right now, where they can walk around with their phones when they're doing tours and they can just change what's being displayed on the screens from their phone. So we are putting some resources behind it because we believe in it that we could help a lot of different partners achieve their goals there. David: I would imagine the typical media companies, even very large ones, would be pretty happy if somebody handled these more involved installations like Times Square or an entertainment district where there's a lot of screens because they're primarily in the business of selling media time and display faces and so on. I don't know that they really want to get all that dirty in terms of running these kinds of networks, particularly when they start to get quite complicated.  Joe Occhipinti: Literally and figuratively dirty like we're also installing the displays. It's a heavy construction type thing too. Right. So we're installing the display, we're doing the steel work and then we're plugging everything in and running the show as well. So yeah, I think we have a lot to offer. And obviously, we need to make some enhancements and it's almost like the out of home stuff isn't easier. It's different from in-game live presentations. And like you said, the legacy business was built that way. So when we got into the out of home market, it worked for out of home but we had some of these features like scheduling and overtakes and some of these things but they weren't maybe as robust as they are today cause we started doing more in it.  So, we've really focused in and debugged them and made them stronger and better so that we can run an out of home type market but it's almost too robust for the simple kind of one display on the side of a building like I'm talking about where we specialize is game presentation where you see five or six or seven different screens. They all have to be synced to kind of make the game presentation feel cohesive or in certain venues like Westfield, where you see many screens at once, you don't want it to be choppy and look off but we're maybe a little bit too robust when it comes to a single display, right? And because we're too robust, our features, maybe a little bit heavy in terms of costs. So we're going to try to address some of those things and really create something that would get all the features that we have but can also be used in an easier type setting as well and not be so cost effective and then like I said, we want to start getting our cloud infrastructure stronger and things like that, so that people can go by and change it with a phone. Right now we have people on staff that are scheduling these places for us in our lives. They're voting in and scheduling all these things. It would be easy if you work for Westfield World Trade and you're trying to court a client. You don't have to coordinate with ANC and the scheduler to, Hey, between 11 and 12, I want to show Sixteen Nine podcasts on all displays.  You could just walk around and you could press a button on your phone and right when you're showing up and you can just launch it. Right. So we're trying to do things like that.  David: The Fulton Center thing is interesting in how it crosses into a world trade in the Oculus retail area and so on. What did you learn out of that in terms of putting together a visual network that was going to run across multiple venues that aren't necessarily visible to one another. They're connected by tunnels or concourses but they're different things in certain respects and also, instead of a game where people are sitting for 40 minutes, almost all of them are constantly on the move.  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. So obviously they placed the screens in places where they felt there was going to be higher traffic, right? Like an entrance to a subway tunnel or you come out of the path from Jersey and you're trying to get up into street level Manhattan and you walk that past, what amounts to almost four or five hundred feet of screens and it was definitely a little difficult to envision what they were trying to do but as it started to come together, it made a lot of sense to us and they kind of made it a little easier on us than had they treated the different areas of the facility to want to run different things, right? They want the whole facility to run everything all at the same time. So we're able to create the software, create batches that have all the displays and throw all the content in there and then schedule them appropriately rather than this side underneath by the path station needs to run this at this time and then over by tower two, we want to run that. And then in Fulton, we want to run this other thing.  They are two separate venues so we have two different schedules going at each one because they're different trains that run at each station, right? So in Fulton, you have four or five. And in Westfield, you have the AC and the two-three or whatever it is. So you have to decipher what goes where but the way they wanted to run it allowed things to be a little bit easier on the back end but we had to deal with network infrastructure and everything else like that which was new to us in this type of a venue. But they're really there to obviously be advertisements. Also, they need to make the place feel beautiful. Have you ever been down there? It's like all marble, it's a really beautiful facility. So they had to fit and they wanted to be in your face cause they were driving advertisements. They want to be appealing but they still need it to be beautiful and look good as well. So there was a lot of pressure on us too. The 24/7 nature of it is a little different than sports where you have a game and if something goes wrong, you generally have till the next day or two days later to fix it. That doesn't happen outside of home. Things gotta be working 23 and a half hours a day with not a lot of downtime and not a lot of issues happening because advertisers are walking through it and potential advertisers and the customers. So it was a lot of pressure on us. We literally have people walking the facilities downtown, New York, for 18 hours a day reporting issues and fixing issues. We don't want to have any downtime on these displays because the stakes are that high.  David: Yeah, really. How many people do you have working in the company? Roughly?  Joe Occhipinti: We have about just under a hundred full timers and depending on the seasonality of it, we have around 200 part timers that work for us all across the country.  David: And of the full timers are most of them kind of in the greater New York area. Joe Occhipinti: There's probably like 30 percent in this area, just cause like I said, we have a lot downtown and kind of work at our headquarters in Westchester but we're pretty spread out. We have upwards of almost a hundred venues across the country where we have something.  So, in those markets, like in LA or Washington DC or Baltimore, where we have a lot of different things going on. We have full timers that are in those markets actually running a stable of part timers as well.  David: Yeah, because they need to be there. They can't just say, well I can get there next Thursday or something. Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, they gotta be there at a moment's notice most of the time. .  David: Alright. This is great. If people wanna know more about ANC, they just go to ANC.com.  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. ANC.com.  David: Nice and simple.  Joe Occhipinti: We do some stuff on social media but LinkedIn is really probably the one that makes the most sense if you want to check out some of our posts and what we've been up to lately. But we just did a full rebrand. We changed our logo. We kind of changed our colors after we bought the company back. I think the website looks great. So yeah, ANC.com will take you straight there and you guys can learn everything there is to know about us.  David: Powered by C10, I see. Joe Occhipinti: Powered by C10. C10's still around. Obviously, Jerry Cifrelli Jr. founded that company and that was the vehicle from which we acquired ANC but obviously with the legacy he had with his father and the name brand that ANC had, we decided we wanted to keep it. And just give it a refresh and push it forward. David: All right. Joe, Thank you very much for your time.  Joe Occhipinti: Thank you, Dave. This has been great. I appreciate it.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Set top boxes have long been looked at, theoretically at least, as single-purpose devices that would do nicely as digital signage media players, but it's fair to say a lot of software company developer and support teams have painful memories of trying to use consumer devices from China as Android-based players. They weren't reliable in terms of performance, or even in terms of what showed up from shipment to shipment. So what if a company that was expressly in the business of commercial-grade set top boxes for the pay TV and cable markets got into digital signage? That's the deal with a UK company called Amino, which now has two lines of business - pay TV and pro AV applications like digital signage. These are devices that are engineered to last for five or six years, and in a lot of cases, they are happily ticking away for a decade and longer. High reliability and remote management are inherent in the product design, so meeting that common pro AV demand was largely automatic. I had a good chat with Rowan Brunger, Amino's UK-based Sales Director, about the hardware, how the company goes to market, and what's involved if software companies and solutions providers want to add Amino devices as a hardware option. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Rowan, thank you for joining me. I bumped into you last year and basically said, what do you guys do? Cause I'd never heard of you and we'd intended to do a podcast and finally got around to it. So for those people who don't know the company, what are you all about?  Rowan Brunger: Thanks, David. Thanks for having me on. So yeah, great to be here. We are a company called Amino and we've been around for about 25 years. So we have two sides to our business. Primarily, we've been a set top box manufacturer within the pay TV world and in the last few years, we've made a move to expand our enterprise TV and digital signage side of the business which is rapidly growing some momentum in terms of those 25 years we've been around, we've probably got 25 million devices in circulation and we've got quite a compelling device management system that we've tweaked from our experience in the pay TV world brought over to the pro AV arena for managing the states of media devices.  David: So when you say pay TV, you basically in the context of what North Americans would understand that basically means cable TV.   Rowan Brunger: Yeah, cable TV. So tier one, tier two, satellite providers where we would typically either have an Amino box or we'd OEM a box for the actual operator. So we're used to selling in big numbers to operators and what really differentiated us in that market which we're using in this one is the remote device management. So as you can imagine, if we're sending hundreds of thousands of boxes out, we want it to be relatively zero touch from the consumer's environment. We want them to plug the cables in and we do the rest remotely. So that's really what spawn orchestrate products, which is our device management platform that we've tweaked and made more applicable to the pro IV market to manage our media players. David: When you opened up the digital signage/enterprise TV market, was that based on inbound requests, Hey, we would really like to use a set top box. Do you support this market or there may be multiple answers but I'm curious if you kind of looked at where linear TV or cable TV was going, given streaming and the way that was bubbling up and realized, okay, we needed to, we need to open up a new market.  Rowan Brunger: I guess a combination of the various different scenarios you've given there. I mean, it's key to say we've always had a foot within the digital signage and enterprise video world. There's amino products that have been out there for sort of 10 years plus. I guess one of the main alliances partners we had in the past was Triple Play. So we manufactured a lot of the endpoints for Triple Play, Vitech and some of the IPTV streaming guys. So we've got loads of boxes out there in circulation and they're coming up for renewal or people wanting to upgrade to 4k, et cetera.  So that gives us a natural pull off. Okay, let's look at this market in isolation rather than just bolting onto our existing business. And then there's actually looking at the experience that we've gained in the pay TV world which has become a very competitive environment to be in. We can take a lot of that experience and truly add some value within the pro AV space with the gravitas of products and devices that we've managed previously and importantly, bringing over our video expertise onto the media player, rather than just looking at signage. We've done well where we integrate the two and we're finding a lot of customers are wanting both of them to run side by side on one device. So we can pull the huge expertise we have in enterprise video and actually put it on the same device next to, for instance, the CMS platform,  David: The markets and the use cases are, in some respects, very similar in terms of both needing very high quality of service. Like the stuff can't go down, right? Rowan Brunger: Sure. Yeah. We look at that from a number of different angles in terms of the physical player itself is truly enterprise grade, steel case designed to work in all environments 24 seven and some would argue we've even over engineered it. I mean, we've literally got boxes that have been running 24 seven in the field for 10 or 12 years solid and they're still displaying every single hour of the day.  But then there's the actual total robustness of the system and that's the inevitably when something does go wrong and things obviously do go wrong, the ability to fix that very quickly and also the ability to make sure the ongoing security and updates of that device are easy to get onto it, is as important as it running really. David: Yeah, I would say any number of CMS software companies in the industry have only in the last few years sort of realized the importance of remote device management, whereas it would have been inherent in what you do right from the start, right?  Rowan Brunger: Yeah, it's absolutely an upfront thought in where we've come from. And inevitably like a lot of things, you only realize how much you need something when you don't have it and when there's a problem. So certainly a lot of the signage projects that were involved with it, it's not their first signage project at all. They're learning from the deployments they've already made and what the pinch points were and what the really painful bits about it. And I think we're in a world now where people are taking their signage a lot more seriously with a big emphasis and cost push to get people back to the high street. For instance, when we're looking at retail, it's not just a tick box, we have a signage system in place. It's got to be absolutely robust. You've got to be able to rely on it and certainly, in times where people are paying to have their content advertised within the stores or the settings, they want to know it's actually been on the screen.  David: So you're competing in a few ways with different kinds of companies. You've got the consumer/prosumer android set top boxes that have come over from Shenzhen or whatever. You've got special purpose media play out boxes like a bright sign box and then you've got companies like SPINX who have their own box and other companies that have their own boxes and then you have PCs. So how do you kind of position yourself?  Rowan Brunger: It's a really good question. So, if I cover the first section early on, I'll probably include system on chip in that as well. So we've got a system on chip users, people have realized that there's value in having a player but maybe not as necessarily selected. One that hits all their objectives, I'm sure we say and then we've got the likes of the guys that do really high end boxes with multiple outputs. We've liked to keep this really simple, we have two products in our portfolio, for instance, we have a POE model and we have a Wifi model. So we keep it really simple. It's at a price point where we're stretching the people from the cheap consumer devices and the system on chip operators but add enough value to make that extra investment to move towards an enterprise grade player but we're underneath a lot of our true competitors that you know do fit for purpose signage players because we don't try and do everything. So I'll give you an example of that. We like to partner with specialists in areas that aren't familiar to us. So if somebody needs a four output player, we've got a partnership with the likes of Matrox to give you that. So those guys specialize in multiple output play, cards and players, we feed into it. But what that gives the customer is one platform for pretty much whatever they want to do. So our device management and the reliability is right up there with the top end competitors. But we've got a really simplistic view and what our customers like is no matter what they're displaying or what they're using the player for, it's the same player that does it all. So we've got one customer that has probably six use cases for our player within their stores. So a large rollout of about 650-700 stores in the UK and they're doing multiple things with it but they know it's a H 200 player,  that is just programmed in different ways for those different use cases and they really liked that from a maintenance point of view. So we've kept things really simple. We are definitely a step up and a professional grade player to challenge the lower end operators in the market and in terms of the higher end guys, I think we're hitting a price point. They can't, so we can get mass adoption from our product and we've got the right partnerships in place to cover all use cases with the guys that lead the industry in those areas. David: So for the age 200 player. If I'm buying, like 10 of them, what roughly in U. S. dollars would be the cost?  Rowan Brunger: So well, I'm doing a conversion in my head.  David: Well, give me, EU or sterling.  Rowan Brunger: Yeah, so we've got a package to trade within Europe that's about 240 pounds. Okay. What are we at? Just over 300 and that's a full two year package of enhanced support, premium device management software on the player itself. The player itself is around 200 on its own with various different options. So it hits a price point if you want to power four screens; for instance, in a video wall, it actually becomes price. It prices itself well enough that you could actually put a player on each of those screens, run it as a video wall, or run them individually and have that flexibility. So you're not just doing one or the other, yet you're still coming in at probably less than a quad head player that would powerful screens,  David: Yeah, and it's interesting. By standardizing on just one box for a whole bunch of different use cases, you could keep a spares pool without having to think, okay, I need two spares of these and two spares of those, and so on. You just have five on the shelf that you can pull off if you need to. Rowan Brunger: Exactly that. I mean the scenario I just gave you before, they're even looking at running just some simple audio or some simple HTML pages, just because they like the simplicity that everything is powered by exactly the same thing.  David: You mentioned that you've had stuff in the field for 10 years. Do you have a rated operating life?  Rowan Brunger: Well, the chipset has changed, which has sort of adapted that slightly, and then you've obviously got the provisions of using flash memory but the products that we have in the field have normally been programmed to do one thing, from the offset. So, quite often, decoding video streams, so they haven't really been updated, and that's why they've been running for 10 or 12 years plus. They're designed and warranted to run for, you know, the standard sort of five or six years, but they've become so robust that people have just left them in cause they're working.  We've got an airport with 2000 of the units in, and it's only because they want to change to full grade that they even thought about upgrading them. They've been running in excess of 10 years in that airport. David: So with the build for these units, if I have 500 of them and I decide, okay, I'm expanding, I'm an airport, I'm expanding a new terminal. I need 500 more. Is it going to be a different box at this point, or would that even matter? Rowan Brunger: The H200 has been around for about two years now, it really depends on when those proxies were deployed but the older boxes that we have in the sort of thousands out there, aren't supported anymore because they're well over 10 years old, but we've got a very easy upgrade path to swap those boxes out for the new range of products. And in doing that, they're all on the same platform for managing them then as well. David: I asked this because one of the complaints, among probably quite a few complaints with buying little Android boxes from Shenzhen or elsewhere is that if you order a hundred of them and then you order another hundred that second batch of one hundred might have different operating systems or different versions of the operating system, different electronics inside and everything else. So every time they show up, you're starting from scratch. Rowan Brunger: Absolutely. Welcome to buying consumer products. But we manage our chipsets and our components very strictly, and you can imagine the volumes we make them in because there's a lot of crossover from the set-top box side of the business but more importantly, we operate Android AOSP. So, we actually control and write the firmware for the product ourselves. So, in terms of updating the products, we're putting our own firmware on there. We're not relying on Google or Android updates for anything; in fact, much the opposite, because we want to be in control of it. So for instance, when you boot one of our boxes up, there's no app store. There's no standard Google browser on there, it's exactly what we choose to put on there, which makes it very fit for purpose because it's not running a million things in the background. We give it some very clear parameters and control exactly what middleware or APK that we put on there that's monitored centrally and all the versions and updates are controlled centrally as well. So you know exactly what's on there and you're the master of your own destiny.  David: Are you having to worry about security, well, I guess everybody worries about security, but because, as you just described, does that kind of greatly reduce the risks? Rowan Brunger: Yeah, it does, and again, this is something we've pulled over from our knowledge of the Pay TV market. So working with Android, we adhere to some pretty strict guidelines from Google in terms of security patches and timely updates, et cetera, and we actually think that's really very relevant in the pro AV market as well. So we've actually pulled over the standards that we adhere to on the Pay TV market, within the digital signage space. So as a result of that, we do at least four firmware updates a year that contain all the relevant security patches because there's nothing else on there in terms of an app store, et cetera, we're cleared in very highly secure environments. So we do a lot of work with the government. We've got a really interesting project going on, within a prison. So somebody's made their own middleware that they're using on the box and actually running entertainment within prison cells using the H200, which you can imagine is a super secure environment. So because we're in complete control of it, we can make it as secure as we like. And we're seeing that more and more prevalent with even retail rollouts now, with things like 802.1X authentication on networks, which I've never heard asked for but have been asked quite a lot for recently. So we quite got an agile development team. We're able to add functions like that and drop them in the latest firmware, and get them out of the boxes very quickly.  David: So because you're shipping a lot of units, do you get some sense of what the marketplace demand is?  For the longest time, people were saying, yes, it would be nice if we went to 4k, but nobody actually needs it yet, and for signage applications, it's probably never needed. Certainly, 8k, which is being marketed, is something that is probably years away if it ever comes. What is the marketplace actually using? Rowan Brunger: We are being asked for 4k a lot more. You're right in the signage space; it's less applicable, although a lot of the CMS providers don't even output in 4k, which, obviously, is a stumbling block. But for those that do, we're just testing a build for 4k content at the moment, and we've got out with some beta testers, and that's going very well. Obviously, 4k video is pretty much a must when people are looking at video, and that's very much our expertise, how we can stream that and what protocols we use to stream it and transport streams and encryption, is all around 4k and in particular, low latency is something that we specialize in quite a lot. So that takes us down certain vertical markets such as sporting and gaming where latency is an absolute deal breaker.  So we're seeing for our players and going back to your question about market trends, I'd say 50% of our opportunities are video-led, and the other 50% are signage-led, but with an element of video, a lot of them are with an element of video as well. So I think our expertise in video is really setting us apart here, and that, down the 4k route. POE has been requested more and more so that's why it's standard on our H200s. David: For retail more than anything I would imagine? Rowan Brunger: Actually, no, and I thought it would be, but what we're seeing is the requests for Wi-Fi is actually coming through retail more than anywhere else because when people are doing a retrofit of a store or they want to have quite an agile space within the store and be creative with where they're putting the screens, there's not normally a network point there. So we're actually finding some of our big retail rollouts are actually going down the Wi-Fi route, which I didn't expect, to be honest, but we've done a separate Wi-Fi unit for that marketplace because leading back to the security, a lot of our government and military deployments require us not to even have the ability to have Wi-Fi in the box altogether, which is why we didn't just add Wi-Fi to the existing H200. We've actually done it as two separate products. But yeah, interestingly, we've just launched our, or we're just in the process of launching our Wi-Fi unit, and the inquiries that are coming in are predominantly retail, and also the leisure industry as well as people want to put more screens and things in bars and pubs that typically have terrible infrastructure. Wi-Fi seems to be the easiest route to go with that as well.  David: You mentioned streaming, I'm a little curious about that because most of the set-top boxes that are on the market have onboard storage and digital signage most typically is forward and stored and played off of a hard drive locally.  Are your boxes doing that, or is it all streaming? Rowan Brunger: No, it's all streaming. We can digest the number of transport streams such as multicast, unicast, low latency dash, and low latency HLS because that's what our bread and butter are on the set-top box side of the world. So we're finding a lot of people for instance, within the betting industry where low latency is an absolute must, we're working with specific middleware vendors that provide the streams on an OTT basis, and we decode them locally on the box with various different levels of encryption and it's enabling people to reduce the amount of head end hardware that they've got. Even down to sort of office builds, government buildings where there's an element of wanting just some basic news channels alongside the signage, the ability to switch between the two. So typically, you'd have a big head end, consumer set-top box with aerial on the roof, bringing those streams down, we're able to bring them in completely OTT. So we remove the need for all of that hardware, and just, bring it on an OTT basis straight to the box, which is game-changing for somebody that's, maybe, got a larger state and they have to rent aerial space on the roof of all their stores, have a big server unit within there, consuming a lot of power, needing managing, and obviously bringing those streams down locally, we literally just pop the addresses into the box, into a JSON file and we pull them down through our player that's on board within the software stack. David: Are there worries at all about the quality of service and reliability of service for connectivity? Because God knows that used to be an issue, but maybe it's gone away.  Rowan Brunger: It's becoming less of an issue because with different encryptions and transport streams, they require a lot less bandwidth. It still needs assessing, obviously, when you're looking at a sign. But you can tweak the bitrate frames between the different encryption levels to get to a happy medium of a quality that you want alongside a bandwidth that you're willing to play with. So, it's becoming less of an issue. We can still obviously decode on-prem feeds as well when it's absolutely paramount that the feeds have got to be on-premises but the bandwidth is becoming less and less of an issue now.  David: You mentioned enterprise TV at the front end of our chat. How do you define that?  Rowan Brunger: So it's really whether it's TV-led, and what I mean by enterprise TV is, anything that's not residential, and not, hospitality so retail, office environments, sports stadium, things like that. That's where we'd class as enterprise TV. So it's the enterprise-grade of the box, but it's primarily streaming IPTV rather than just signage.  David: Do you sell direct or do you kind of go through a channel or, through software partners? Rowan Brunger: So we sell purely through a channel. We sell through distributors around the globe, trade only, through the channel directly to our system integrators, and onto the end users. So yeah, we're a channel-focused business, and that's something that we've recently sort of redesigned because that model is very different from what Amino is used to in the Pay TV market where they may deal directly with operators. We've decided that within this marketplace, a channel-only focus is the best way to go. It ensures our partner's protection on pricing and margin, et cetera, and also gives us scalability that we've got partners out there promoting the product for us. David: When you started Looking at the digital signage market, was it a little baffling when you realized how many software companies there are? Rowan Brunger: Yes, there does seem to be an ever ending amount of CMS partners to play with. We've worked with a couple that we've got a history with and onboarded those guys. We've now got an accreditation process. So when we do onboard a partner, we truly onboard them as a partnership rather than just saying, okay, we've tested that version of the APK, and that works fine. Let's call it accredited.  We actually onboard them and make a commitment that CMS will work ongoing with Amino and we go into a partnership with the CMS so we get beta releases of each other's software so we can truly test it in advance, which is why it takes a little bit of time to onboard, although we have quite an impressive list of CMS vendors on the list to go through accreditation, so it is definitely a nice route to market. We want to play with as many people as we can. At the same time, not overloading ourselves.  I think what's helping us there is the fact that a lot of CMSs seem to develop their APK before the platforms, so we do tend to be able to onboard people fairly quickly. And if there is any integration work that needs doing, it's fairly straightforward, and we've seen it before on somebody else's application. So yeah, onboarding and partnering are absolutely key for us over the next 12 months. We don't want what CMS somebody uses to be a barrier to sell, and it's not just a CMS, we work very closely with a number of streaming middleware companies as well that are specific in certain vertical markets as well.  David: So you're at a stand at some trade show and a CMS, digital signage CMS software company walks up and says, “Hi, I'm aware of you guys, and would like to be involved.” What's that thing you tell them when they say, “What do we need or how do we need to be set up in order for this to work?”  Rowan Brunger: Initially, we would ask for a version of their application and log in to their system, and we deliberately ask for no more than that because we want to test it as a virgin user if you like. So we put it through a first round of testing, which is: Does this go onto the box? Does it behave as if I would expect it to behave as a user? And that's our first round of testing. Normally, if that goes okay, we put it forward towards a full Q.A. test with our Hong Kong development team, which is a 400-point Q.A. test, which literally tests every element of the software and the integration, and at that point, we give a report back to the CMS provider to say, “Yes, it's all gone smoothly” or “It works, but can we suggest we do this and this integration together to make it a better experience?” And then, we go into the commercials of the partnership and make sure that we're sharing best practices with each other in terms of updates and things. We also have a lot of APIs that are available through our remote management software that we're finding a lot more of the CMS partners want to integrate into their CMS platform to give the end users, that one pane of glass, whether they're managing content or the device that they can do it in one place. So we have completely open APIs for the CMS partners to be able to do that and put a lot of the functionality that we have in our device management, actually in their front-end system that the customer is using every day for the content.  David: Does your platform support IP streaming or multicast or that sort of thing? Is there a foundational thing they have to have?  Rowan Brunger: No, not at all. We are dealing with some partners to put our video play technology within their CMS but it's not these guys' expertise. So, actually, the value to them of working with Amino is you can run their CMS software and switch seamlessly into an IPTV solution alongside their CMS. So, all of a sudden, they can speak to their customers about IPTV streaming solutions alongside pretty much any CMS rather than having to have a specialized solution incorporated into their roadmap.  How many times have we provided screens to somebody and you get the call, maybe two, two weeks later, two years later, “Can we put some TV streams through this for us?” For us, that's just a service we can turn on without having to ship any hardware. So it gives a lot of flexibility to these existing CMS deployments.  David: You mentioned the Hong Kong software team, is that where the company is based?  Rowan Brunger: No, we're based in Cambridge in the UK. So we are a UK-based company and have been for our existence. We have a couple of support teams. One is in Portugal, level one support is in Portugal, and we have a level two support team in Hong Kong. So we've got to follow the sun kind of coverage on support.  David: And manufacturing is done in China like everybody else? Rowan Brunger: Some manufacturing is done in China. There's a whole host of countries that we're manufacturing in. We've got stuff coming out of Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong. It depends on the product or the chipset, but yeah, a fairly well-diverse manufacturing plant. We're not stationed all in one place. David: What's the next AV trade show that you guys will have a stand at or a presence at?  Rowan Brunger: So Infocomm is coming up. We've got a presence there, and we've just done ISE, as you know, and then we've got some presence at NAB as well because we do see some crossover from some of the broadcasting shows that are looking at enterprise video or signage. So our trade show calendar is still split between Pay TV, but with a much larger emphasis than we have done on the AV world.  David: If people want to know more about Amino, where do they find you online? Rowan Brunger: Sure, just go to Amino.tv.  David: Clever! All right, Rowan, thank you very much for your time. Rowan Brunger: Thank you, David. Pleasure as always.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There are lots of reasons why digital signage and digital out of home ad networks don't have audio - the biggest reason being that the majority of people (especially staff who are in that environment all day) don't want to hear messages over and over. Many speakers have been stabbed with forks or seen their audio cables snipped by workers who could not take it day after day. But there also cases in which audio would be welcomed, and very useful. There are different technologies out there that can enhance and complement the messaging on screens, and headset devices that can be borrowed or rented, so that audio can be added to things like museums and attractions or live sports events. The challenge is that the technology used might be old and limited, or the set-up requires maintaining, cleaning, charging and keeping track of a lot of hardware. A Montreal company called DVOX is taking a different approach - making audio streams from live events and from screens available over local area networks and WiFi, so that anyone with a smartphone and headphones of some kind can launch a simple web app and start listening. The primary markets, I think, are with big sporting events and conferences, but it's also the sort of thing that has applications for digital signage and digital out of home. I spoke with DVOX president Sebastien Boulanger. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Sebastien, thank you for joining me. I know very little about DVOX. Could you give me a rundown of what the company is?  Sebastien Boulanger: DVOX is a fast-growing startup at the moment that is offering a new generation technology for live audio streaming purposes in several domains.  How does it work? Sebastien Boulanger: Easy enough. DVOX is taking and acquiring any analog audio source, that might be coming from a live microphone, sound desk, broadcasting trailer, audio extractor devices, or whatever you please. We're acquiring analog audio input and then converting it to digital to stream it directly over the local area network, meaning that guests or visitors have to be connected to the right WiFi to be granted access to the audio stream. We're doing so that the stream goes out through a webpage, so the end user doesn't have to install any mobile apps or whatever. It's only a web browser page, basically.  So the idea is you're seeing stuff on a screen at whatever venue you're in, whether it's a sports bar or a sports stadium or some other place, you can basically hear the audio without, the having to crank the speakers to 11 for, that to happen? Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct. Let me give you a couple of examples here that might be helpful here. Let's say you are in a sports bar, as you were just mentioning, and you have plenty of screens in front of you. So, which of those screens will be on the speaker boxes? So basically you can have ambiance, music, whatever for all the other guests, but if you feel like you want to hear a football match, you simply have to have the audio of that screen.  So with DVOX what you can do is have all the different audio feeds running inside of the system And then by being connected to the right WiFi, you will be able to choose which audio feed you want to hear, so basically, through a regular webpage,, as simple as browsing, you have access to all of the audio feed that the venue is offering in live, in real-time. You only need a QR code to get onto the event page, and if you're on the right WiFi, there you go; you have all the feeds.  You're using a smartphone and a web app to get this, as opposed to asking people to download our special app and go through a bunch of hoops?  Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct. And that's why we're having a lot of pull these days in the sports industries, in the congress center industries as well, educational because any audio source can be streamed through WiFi. We're just back from Detroit, where we're showcasing our technology to a league, which is called the UFL, and in the meantime, we present it to the NFL Lions and the Active Forward Field, and basically, what these guys are offering is having a 60,000 seats venue with powerful WiFi coverage. So now, with DVOX, they can have any exclusive content because it's not a broadcast. It's a local stream. It's a huge difference here. So basically, they can have any audio feed, and give it to all of the attendee's, ticket owners that are inside of the building to have exclusive content. So, while your eyes are looking at a football game, you can have an audio description, you can have a quarterback microphone, you can have a bench microphone, you can have anything you please, basically.  As long as the organizer decides to make that available, you can capture it through your devices and then use it. Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct. Mainly what we're doing is installing physically the device, the DVOX hardware piece of equipment next to the broadcasting trailer, let's call it in the loading dock, if you please, because all the audio feeds run through that truck, basically broadcasting trailer. But before getting those streams to the sound desk and on air, we can have those same feeds and put them back in the venue for the guests that are attending.  If we rollback a little bit of discussion to the digital signage here, just to give you another example, it might be helpful to understand with another example. Let's say you are in an airport. So you are here two hours, three hours prior to your flight. You already have your headphones. There's already WiFi in the airport, and there's, I don't know, in between 600-2000 screens all over the airport. All of those screens are on mute. But why? Because it would be a mess to try to have sound coming out of those. That's for sure.  So now, you have plenty of apps that could be available, and some of them are really neat. I'm not arguing these, but you might be a tourist with a foreign SIM card, not having a data plan or whatever. With DVOX, basically, you log into the WiFi, simply browse to the airport webpage that is offering sound, and if all of those are video feed or backed by an audio feed that the airport wants to give you, then all of a sudden you have access to the audio feed for all the screens without the need to install anything, no latency, and then, basically, you choose whatever you want to hear without reading the subtitles all the time.  I travel a lot. I go through a lot of airports, and the quality of the WiFi varies pretty widely, from airport to airport, sometimes it's amazing, and sometimes it's dreadful. What kind of impact does introducing these audio streams to an airport that maybe already has as much demand as it can handle, what's that going to do? Sebastien Boulanger: That's actually a really good question, and here's one thing I would like to explain in detail here, if I may. WiFi is one thing, internet access is another one. So, in your example here, when you're saying the WiFi is weak, is it the WiFi strength, the coverage, or the internet access? Because sometimes, the issue is not necessarily the strongness of the signal, meaning you have good reception over the WiFi antennas that are installed all over the airports. There are so few nets, but yeah, you're right, sometimes the administrator just locks to a certain speed, the up and down traffic to avoid having a bottleneck to the networks for somebody with, I don't know, streaming live or whatever.  The thing is, with DVOX, when you are on to the WiFi, you simply download, if I could say, the visual of the event page. So, simply by browsing, you're accessing a webpage. Same thing as when you are asking for google.com, and you have the search bar popping in. So basically you only have a visual that's coming in. But as soon as you click on play, all the audio feeds are kept local. Your cell phone has a direct path to the hardware, which is inside the building. So to answer your question, having slow internet is not even a problem as long as you have WiFi coverage, and even with only one bar of signal, that says we're enough because we're only carrying audio around on purpose. So here, in that scenario, we are using 48 kilobits per second per user per listener. 48 kilobits is nothing. Those antennas are built to manage one gigabyte of data transfer. Everything stays local. So there is no round-time trip latency with the cloud or internet, whatever. So we have less than 0.04 seconds delay. So on the WiFi, it's really light.  Unlike if you're trying to send video around, which should be very heavy on a network if there was a lot of demand, audio is nothing.  Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, absolutely. Plus I'd like to add that since we know that we are only audio for obvious reasons, all the web browsers are behaving the same way. And for any network, might it be public or private or whatever WiFi infrastructure, we are considered as voice over IP. So, therefore, there's already pre-configured, quality of servicing because, of course, people sometimes are having Messenger calls or FaceTime or whatever. So the audio goes smoothly through any network, and all the web browsers, such as Safari, Chrome, Edge, whatever browser you might be using are behaving the same way because they think it's a web radio.  So you can kill your screen put your cell phone in your pocket and keep listening for hours without dragging down your battery. If we were to have video content or subtitles or video bumper or whatever, we would be having issues with being polyvalent with all the web browsers they are not behaving the same way.  So this concept and need has been around for a while now. The idea that I wish I could hear what was on that screen, but they've kept the sound down for whatever reason, or I wish I could hear this or that.  There have been other attempts in the past to do this sort of thing. I remember there was a little company called, Hear My Lips which is a god-awful name, but maybe that was part of the problem. But there's been a few things out there. Technology advances this stuff, obviously. But I've also seen things like golf tournaments or other events where people have this weird little thing clipped onto one of their ears. That's a remote speaker, it's a hardware device that you have to have in order for you to hear specialized commentary or something. You're saying we can remove that equipment because you have a receiver in your pocket anyway, your smartphone and earbuds, and you're good to go.  Sebastien Boulanger: That is correct. And, I would like to compliment or answer that question with a brief history of DVOX. So being myself, a technical director in the show business industry for a while, at first I was asked to have instant translation over a large crowd, let's say 2000+ guests at a corporate event back in 2015 and back then in 2015, there was still a lot of Blackberry in the market and it was a business conference. So even the business people attending did not necessarily own their own cell phones. Remember the very beginning of the Apple smartphones, sometimes they were business phones, so they wouldn't even be allowed to install. Plus the speakers, the keynote speakers, or themselves refracting the fact that their content might be going into the cloud. They didn't want that because they just created or written a speech for this particular event without allowing us to have any content going to the cloud.  That said back then, I only had infrared technology, which is great, but it's an old-generation technology where you need to have dedicated receivers, landing counters, managing IP, installing radiators, and so on. So then what's left, you have FM technology, which is behaving the same way, basically with a dedicated receiver. And you know as well as I do that all the FM frequencies are saturated, downtown, and it was a mass basically. So now by looking for a solution, I end up with apps that were out of the question. So back in 2015, they said, okay, there's nothing that is doing a simple thing, which is acquiring audio streaming live through a webpage. So then I asked around, and I decided to build it. So if I rolled back to your previous question, sorry for the long answer, you're absolutely right. Any cell phone and/or an MP3 player, which is WiFi capable, iPad or anything that has a web browser that can be on the WiFi is, in fact, an actual receiver with DVOX.  So that you may use your preferred headphones or your preferred Bluetooth devices that you already have configured with your cell phone and there you go, you have a new receiver. It's really convenient. You don't have to bother with having a dedicated piece of equipment. There's no cumbersome stuff to install either.  I was in the UK a few months ago on a working holiday and went to a couple of museums or places where you would pay to get in and walk around, and you could give them five pounds, and they would give you a headset device of some kind that streamed, and I thought they were great, but there's a whole routine to cleaning them, making sure that they get them back. I'm sure there's maybe not shrinkage because people aren't really stealing them as much as just forgetting they have them, and they walk out and see them when they're on the subway, and they decide, you know what, I'm not going all the way back with it, so they toss them. So it's expensive, and there's a lot of management involved.  You're saying with this, even in a museum setting, you could just use this instead of this hardware suite.  Sebastien Boulanger: Absolutely, and then you don't have to manage all the batteries that are going to be dying and people dropping their receivers. All your points were really valid ones. And, yeah, your cell phone is the only thing you need.  I might add, just to a certain extent, how many cell phones, old cell phones, do you have in your, I don't know, Gunther tray or how many devices do you still have at home from the past? Four or five. Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, there you go. So even without a SIM card, they're still accessing the WiFi, right? So even these old cell phone phones are actually working as a receiver for you. So in a museum environment, I know they do have a lot of schools coming in and younger visitors and stuff like that. So they might be willing to use it. In that sense, this is not an issue at all. Anything that is web-capable is an actual receiver. They may provide, or they can provide themselves, any MP3 player that's WiFi capable, and all of a sudden, you have a visitor that can use their cell phone, and that's it. For an airport, for a museum, for a big sports stadium, those kinds of things, they're going to have IT teams, they're going to have telecommunications closets, IT closets, they've got all the stuff together, and the experience and qualifications to put something like this together.  If it's a sports bar or some sort of small to medium business environment like that, is this over their heads? Is this something that would be great, but they won't even know where to start?  Sebastien Boulanger: Oh, no, it's so easy. Even when we went to the Australian Open at the beginning of the year in January to become a medium, it took 20 minutes. The hardest problem was to have the right feed out of the sound desk, basically over 20 minutes, we're up and running. Let's put it that way, whenever you have audio content somewhere, you have the audio side that you can have access to, and you have a WiFi net, DVOX fits right in between. So, on a boot cycle, we're up in about two minutes, and we're already in your WiFi because we connected the network and then we plug in the analog audio feed. The only thing left is to match the volume, and that's it. It's really easy to understand and integrate.  These are basically rack-mounted appliances, like 2U appliances, you just slide into a rack, and off you go?  Sebastien Boulanger: Absolutely. You need a 2U rack space, and it's super convenient for any rack because they are standard AV kind of dimensions. So this is not a huge rack and this is not a refrigerator that you have to deal with in your AV room.  Yeah, so it would fit in most businesses, and it's not a big footprint, too.  Is it the sort of thing that a business owner could install, or are you doing this through resellers and integrators who would put this in for folks and manage it? Sebastien Boulanger: That's a kind of a two-way answer here. If I were to send you a device right now over FedEx or whatever you receive, I'm pretty sure that within, I don't know, 15 minutes, you'll be up and running. As long as I have a hammer. Sebastien Boulanger: I'm sure you won't need it. You just need an Ethernet cable, not a hammer, and I'm positioning my company as an AV manufacturer here because we're aiming for several markets, and several fields of usage, meaning digital signage, sports, hospitality, transportation, whatever, and whatever, plus we're having several territories. Now, we are distributed in the Australian market and New Zealand. We are as well in the US and Canada, and soon enough, we'll be in the UK. We're just leading the discussion right now. So, I will not personally be able to answer the call for all of these territories, right? So, I'm relying on a seller to help me be the first layer of servicing and/or be the integrator.  And the complexity is not on the DVOX side. Let me give you an example of the airport once again. Whenever you're in the airport, you have announcements, a lot of announcements. You sometimes have ambient music, or, in a sports bar, you have a little happy hour music or whatever. But whenever there's an announcement, it's just taking over because they want to have everyone hear it per terminals, whatever. So these guys already have audio DSPs, amplifiers, speaker boxes, and stuff like that. So basically, by having all the audio DSPs, those AV integrators would reprogram the DSP just to have an audio mix that goes through DVOX that will still keep the announcement on top whenever there's an announcement, right? Priority. But in that sentence here, this is a bit more complex, so yes, an integrator would do it, but for any sports bar, you take any audio source out, maybe an HDMI audio extractor, and put them in a DVOX and that's it, you have nothing else to do, So if you want to have a dedicated mix with priorities over some feeds and blah, blah, blah, that's a little more complex. I'm relying on resellers and integrators, but if you are going your own way with analog in from an auxiliary one out of your preferred sound desk or HDMI extractor or microphone, you're good to go. Does the footprint of a facility, like something like an airport, which is vast, does that present any kind of a problem in terms of latency, on the local area network, or it doesn't matter whether you're 10 feet or a thousand feet away? Sebastien Boulanger: No, absolutely. An airport is a good example here. They can't generate delay on the IT side meter. All of the terminals are interlinked through fiber optics cable. So there's no IT delay, if I can put it that way, and, I'm going to use again this Australian Open example here where we're connected to the Melbourne Olympic Park. These guys had more than 400 antennas, and that was still leaving the site of the Australian Open, and along the bicycle path or whatever, you go out of the site, and you have another section, which has a huge hill, grass slope where people are sitting and looking at an enormous big screen. So, for all of those that are not ticket owners, they could be going there. So the WiFi was offered to that section too, and we were snap-syncing the screen. So the delay of the IT is not an issue. Of course, if you are running with copper wire over 27 switches, you will be infringing on the delay. But, we are not experiencing IT delay, if I can put it that way, on our installation, and we can be as wide as the coverage is.  It strikes me as there's always a challenge with, something unfamiliar to get people to, first of all, be aware, and second, do whatever is needed to get it going. Do you face that at all in terms of putting this in place, like at the Australian Open? How does the Australian Open make their ticket holders and fans aware that this is there and get them to use it? Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, totally. First, they must communicate that this is a DVOX device. This means you should bring your own device and headphones. So what they did in this particular event was to have one or two emails sent prior to the event to the ticket owners mentioning, to bring their headphones or their devices, but on-site, there was a lot of advertisement as well. “We're using DVOX. You can connect to your cell phone!” So that's for the part about bringing your own device. Now, what we did at several events, actually, not only at the Australian Open, is have a small JPEG, a picture, that is telling people, step one, connect to the WiFi with the name of the wife, connect to whatever WiFi, right? Step two, scan this QR and done. So, any guests in the room simply have to take a cell phone, connect to the WiFi, and scan the QR and that's loading the page. That's it. W e also have prints, large banners, vinyls, and stuff like stickers, posters, whatever that are applied almost everywhere on site. So people can have this QR for them. Web, event, page, anywhere, so that's pretty easy to communicate with the guests.  Could you have tiers of service? So let's say you can get a basic thing of the in-game play-by-play, but if you want to hear the audio from the quarterback's helmet or whatever it is, you can get that too, but you're going to pay an extra five bucks or something? Sebastien Boulanger: Paying a little bit, five bucks more, that's totally up to the broadcaster itself because with DVOX, you just give me the audio feed you want to stream. So in your example here, okay, we went to the Crypto.com Arena on the Fox sport request to have a showcase or technology for a boxing match, back in September, and you were sitting in the audience; it was a private one, right? It was with the Fox team and ADI and whatever so we were roughly 30 people trying the solution. So, for that test, what they gave us was the blue corner, red corner, the referee mic, and the commentators. So when you are listening to the commentators, these guys who are commenting on the match are next to the ring, so you can look at their lips and you are directly sitting next to them. You can hear it super clearly, and you don't have any delay. So the lips to your ear are instant, plus whenever these guys were, and that was a heavyweight championship. I'm so happy not to be a boxer or a fighter. These guys are, I'm saying politely, monsters. They're big, and they're anyway. So I was in the audience, and when I grabbed the referee microphone that was falling from the ceiling microphone, you could hear it. The glove hitting the face, the glove smashing the skin of the opponent, and, it, hurts, basically, so you are in the audience, and for the first time, you're experiencing the hit; you can't be closer without getting hit, basically. And the red corner and blue corner were really quiet. These guys are fighting, but as soon as you hear the ring, ding, the dong, and then whenever they jump back to their corner, their coaches are giving them strategy, and you can all hear it. That's really engaging. You can select the red corner, and you can hear, “Okay, just try to block a little more, and he's punching you all the time in the same place.” And you have all this relevant information that is changing the game completely, so basically, it's super easy to get any of your feed out from the broadcaster.  It's interesting. I keep coming back to airports, and honestly, the TV screens that are on there show news every half an hour or whatever, I'm very happy if I can't hear that, but what I would love to be able to hear, particularly at many airports that have god awful audio systems is I'd like to hear the gate announcements because it sounds bad. I can't figure out what they're saying because they're using cheap old speakers or God knows what, but if I could just hear that now they're boarding zone two, I'd be happy as a clam. Sebastien Boulanger: Of course, and not to forget about all those noise canceling headphones that work really great. So you can be in your small cocoon of yourself, and hear everything in the announcement clearly without bothering about a baby crying or so on.  In the digital signage world, we're also leading a discussion with, I'm not going to mention it per se, big players that are offering, exterior places like Square that are surrounded by LED screens. It is not Times Square, but just picture Times Square in your mind so you will see what I'm talking about. So basically, when you are walking in this environment, you have plenty of LED screens, but the only thing you hear is cars passing by, or tires squeaking, or whatever noise might be happening. So all of those. Publicity or visuals are only video for the moment. And, then again, you're walking by, you might be waiting for a bus or whatever, will you take time to install an app? You already have 80 of those on your cell phone. To have the sound of a billboard could be as easy and it is as easy as getting a QR code and then you have it directed. So that's really cool. It's a good way to wait for the bus basically.  Yeah, although I really can't see myself walking through a big public plaza and deciding I want to hear these ads as well, but that's just me. I'm a cranky old fart.  Sebastien Boulanger: No, but you're right. This is not necessarily for publicity audio,, but some places like the one we're talking about right now are also running interviews. Last question, because this just flew by, what am I, as an end user, buying? Am I buying hardware, or am I buying hardware and then subscribing to a service as well? Sebastien Boulanger: Basically, what we are selling at the moment is the hardware solution because we need to acquire the audio and stream it to your network. So, the input card which is DVOX hardware, has to stand inside of your building. On the other hand, we have a yearly licensing, which is really good, though super affordable, because we're not dealing with up and down traffic. So the only reason why we're having a yearly licensing is for you to be able to customize your visuals. You can totally modify the webpage, the event webpage, as we call it. You can put your logo, your color, your name, your picture face, or whatever you decide. So you can customize the visual. You can also customize when it's going to be up and when it's going to disappear when the event is over or whatever, plus one thing that is really important. You can extract the KPIs. Basically, at the end of a certain period of time, you decide you jump into your event, and you can interrogate this system to have relevant tasks. But they're all anonymous, not an app. So we don't know anything about you; we just know about your cell phone. Meaning, how many people were listening to which feed, or how long, and which was the most popular, or what time of the day was the most popular. We can have all these graphs. So, to answer your question, yes, you have a first expense for the hardware. Then, after, there's a super low price licensing; it's a yearly base flat fee, and you can customize as you wish for your unit. And on the back end, you're getting insights on what actually interests people. So, in a bar where you're showing premier league games on eight different screens, you can start to understand, okay, this is actually a Liverpool bar. We didn't know that. But now we do.  Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, and these days, we have enormous LED screens, LED walls, whatever, and we have a lot of pictures inside of it, so we can have several feet inside of the same screen. Well, give me one audio feed per picture in picture, and all of a sudden, we'll be having a totally different experience, and at the end of the day, you can have a look and interrogate the system to see, okay, this one was really popular. So we were paying for the rights to have baseball, but no one listened to it. But there were a lot of people tuned on to the soccer game. So next week, what about taking the PIP out for the baseball game and putting a bigger PIP for the soccer game? So that's only an example, but the KPIs are really relevant. You know exactly how your system is behaving with your guests.  All right. That was terrific and very interesting. Thank you so much for spending a little time with me.  Sebastien Boulanger: Cool. It was a real pleasure, and if you ever have any more questions or whatever, we have our corporate website, dvox.com

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I'm not really joking when I write about needing to find my decoder ring if I am going to write something about an announcement from a digital out of home ad tech company. There are exceptions, of course, but more often than not, I read this stuff and I just go cross-eyed. So I was pleased to learn of a new education-focused initiative called DOOH Academy, which exists to raise the level of understanding of how things work for operators, end-users and the people who make ad-buying and planning decisions. I was also pleased to learn - though I pretty much knew - that I'm not the only one confused as hell by how technology like programmatic is marketed. The Academy is the smiling, weeks-old baby of ad industry veteran Jeff Gunderman, who saw a need to get quality, vendor-neutral educational material out there that helps people get up a steep and slippery learning curve. He has an interesting model - in that the academy is subsidized by companies in this business who also understand everyone benefits from better awareness and deeper knowledge. We had a really good chat about the roots of the online academy, how it works, and also how the industry has responded. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jeff, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what DOOH Academy is all about?  Jeff Gunderman: Yes, the DOOH Academy is the Digital Out of Home Academy, and it is an education initiative I started that is designed to help people understand all of the advances going on in digital and programmatic media for the out-of-home media industry.  I had been a media operator for about 15 years running a company called Eye Corp Media, which was an Australian-based media company, we did both static and digital signage around the country and places like shopping malls, bars, restaurants, and cinema lobbies, and when I sold that business, I essentially was talking with a number of individuals in the industry and recognized that there was a real gap in education and understanding around digital and place-based media, and at the same time, when I sold my company, I started to have some requests from media companies and ad tech firms for consulting work and that clarified for me, really the gap that existed in our industry as we are moving to more of a digital and programmatic world, people are very confused, and so after talking with a number of people in the industry, I felt that we really needed a single point of education to help people understand digital place-based media. I get asked quite a bit if I'm doing any consulting, I don't really do much these days, but when I get asked specifically about doing consulting around digital out-of-home networks, I just say, I really can't help you because I don't fully understand what's going on, I don't understand the nomenclature, everybody seems to market themselves a little bit differently, even if they're doing the same damn thing. It's just overwhelmingly complicated to me, so I do one of these things with my hands up beside me going, I don't even want to touch that.  Jeff Gunderman: You know what? It's much simpler than it seems, but because it's such a massive change from the way we used to plan media with spreadsheets we used to sell a location, or a billboard on the side of a street corner,  You used to sell location and audience. Jeff Gunderman: Location and audience, and now, really what we're selling is I'll use the term audience again, but audience and impressions. So it used to be more boards and ad loops and you'd sell a flip on a board, and nowadays people, especially advertisers, and marketers are really looking to maximize their reach of a very particular audience and the beautiful part about it is that data companies have come in and enabled out-of-home media operators to sell their media based on the audience that's in front of that media, they've enabled the ability to understand the measurement of the audience that actually goes by their boards, and so with all this data and measurement that has come into the space, out-of-home media operators can now, especially digital ones, can now sell their media the same way that social, mobile, online media is sold today, and by the programmatic partners that have come in, have enabled the transactional component of that to happen the same way that digital, social, mobile is being transacted today. S we really are in an amazing position as an industry now to gain a share of the marketing spend. But to do that, we've got to better understand programmatic, especially digital out of home and all the data that sits behind it, and that's what the DOOH Academy is really designed to do to elevate the knowledge level of both media operators and agencies or buyers of place-based, digital and programmatic media. Now, if it's increasingly similar to the way that you plan and buy online and the way you plan and buy mobile, why then are media planners confused by digital out-of-home if it's the same sort of process and everything else? Are they using different naming conventions and things?   Jeff Gunderman: There are a few reasons behind that. The first one is that, especially in the United States, a lot of the people buying this media are out-of-home media specialists. Out-of-home media used to be so complicated to buy, and in some cases, it's still not as smooth as you would like, but it used to be so complicated to buy because there were so many different media operators and so many different options that putting together a plan was a massive undertaking.  Now with digital and especially with the programmatic infrastructure that's out there, you can actually go into a tool and a planning tool or a demand-side platform and you can actually program in the audience you want to reach, the locations you want to be in, all kinds of criteria, and it will connect and pull down the inventory that's available that meets those demand criteria and with the push of a button, essentially you can book a campaign across many different media operators, many different locations, many different boards, and many different media types. And it's so much simpler than it used to be, and it's so much more accurate in your ability to reach an audience. So what we're finding is that out-of-home media, which used to be mainly for branding, can be much more part of the full funnel of audience conversion.  Which gives access to more, better budget, right? Before, it was just gross impressions, like I know that a hundred thousand cars go down this highway every week, and therefore we can estimate that many people are going to see it. Now you can get into much richer data that will tell you, you know, give you a much better sense of how many people actually did look as opposed to that gross number. Jeff Gunderman: That's exactly right. So not only you're tapping into bigger budgets because now, all of a sudden, those digital budgets were designed for activities other than branding, such as store visits, web traffic, or driving conversions. All of that is now trackable within the digital out-of-home space and so we're seeing people who may be used to spending with social, mobile, and online, take a much more serious look at digital out-of-home, not only for that reason, but also because digital out-of-home has such a lower density for fraud and it's a safer place to advertise, and now you can measure it, which is really driving an opportunity for space. I have a theory, and you can tell me it's stupid or spot on. God knows I have no pride of ownership of it. But I get a ton of press releases every week from different digital out-of-home ad tech companies, and they'll say, we've just done this, or we've partnered with these people, and so on, and I will try to read the things and decode what on earth they're going on about, and I've sent notes back to him saying, I've read this five times, I still don't know what the hell this is about, and you're saying it's a lot simpler than maybe I think it is, or the world thinks it is. But my theory is that the marketers are having to change their descriptions, their naming, and everything else about their product versus the other ones just to make it sound distinct. Jeff Gunderman: There are nuances within digital and place-based, specifically within programmatic that are really the catalyst for why the DOOH Academy is in such high demand right now, and it's because if you look at my model, I am funded primarily through sponsorship of companies, unbiased, and nobody can have any kind of exclusivity and when they talk in an educational format that has to be generic and not self-promoting. But what I've found is these competing ad tech agencies, trade associations, media operators, and companies have all come together to support foundational learning that enables people to get to a level of understanding of how the entire ecosystem works together. And then what it has allowed is the same, let's say ad tech companies that are sponsoring, to not have to focus on getting people up to a basic level of education, but then they can focus on really educating on the nuances of their specific platform and the benefits that they drive. And so I think that email communication that you're getting or the other communications you're getting are today confusing. If you went through a digital out-of-home academy course, you learned the full infrastructure of how everything works together from A to Z. Now, all of a sudden, it's going to make sense what that specific company's particular value proposition is and many of these ad tech companies have very specific value propositions that make sense, but they make sense in the context of greater knowledge of what's going on across the industry, and that's where we're really designed to do is to bring the entire industry up to a specific level of education and knowledge base. Is this aimed primarily at newbies to the industry or is it something that everybody could benefit from? Jeff Gunderman: It's interesting you say that. We're now working on advanced courses, but the first course we released is called Digital and Programmatic Fundamentals. It is fantastic for an entry-level person who knows nothing about it because we use vocabulary and acronyms, and we really worked you through the basics of digital and programmatic media in the out-of-focus space. But then it's also very good for people with, I'll say, intermediate knowledge that want to just get to the next level because it's pretty in-depth. It's a five-hour streaming video course with 12 different, we call modules, but we could refer to that as a chapter, and it has 20 different video segments with 12 different industry experts, so it's a very thorough course, but it also starts out very basic so it doesn't leave someone behind. Let's go down to the wood on this. How does it work? You go to the website, and you basically register to become a student? Jeff Gunderman: Exactly. So you go to doohacademy.com, and that is the portal for everything. It's the portal for our learning classes. It's the portal for our thought leadership. It's the portal for company spotlights and other content, and it will continue to build. So all of the content, with the exception of the learning courses, is free. You can go in and see company spotlights on very specific companies. They were just launched recently so you'll see more and more of those start to be released. You can see thought leadership that will continue to release on a fairly regular basis to get ideas of, you know, hot topics that are happening in the industry and people's perspectives, and then there's also the certification courses, and you would go into the course section, and you can register. There's a small fee for the certification courses, and usually, a discount that's out there in the industry can reduce that fee further because all of the courses are underwritten from a cost perspective by the sponsors, and you go on, and you register, and then it is all built on a university grade LMS or learning management system or platform, and so, and it's all streaming videos. So you can start and stop as your schedule permits. So some students will come in, and they'll take the whole course in a weekend, and others will come in, and they'll be on a coffee break, they'll take one video segment at a time, and those are somewhere between 8 and 20 minutes in length, and then they'll turn it off, and they'll come back another day when they have a chance around their next coffee break, and will take the next segment. So, it's fairly easy to navigate at your own pace.  And from what I saw, it's a kind of a combination of interviews/discussions with a second person or, in the case of, I went through the acronym one, or at least kind of quickly bombed my way through it. It was you talking, but also, you had a deck that you were referencing and talking to. So are those the two formats that you're using?  Jeff Gunderman: They are. The real design of the course. I don't call myself the experts, so to speak, I call myself the host because, you know, I have a level of knowledge about all of it, but I really host most of them, mostly through interviews with very specific industry experts. And then on the basic things, I'll teach myself vocabulary and acronyms and a couple of other areas, you'll see me instructing, but for the most part, the design of it is to bring in the foremost experts in a specific topic. So when we talk about an SSP or the sell-side platform, we work with two different ad tech companies and their specific head of supply, we interview on that topic. And so you're hearing really from experts in the industry that are about as knowledgeable as it can be.  But they're not setting the curriculum. They're not saying, okay, this is what I want to talk about for the next 25 minutes with you? Jeff Gunderman: No. They certainly can give me some feedback that they don't like a question or what have you. But, all the questions are formulated by me.  Let's take a step back on this, actually. I think this is important. We have an advisor team and an expert team, and the advisor team helps me guide the actual curriculum. And the experts are experts from multiple competing companies. So I make absolutely sure that I'm not swayed by a certain way of thinking or doing things, and I'm ignoring maybe another option. So we try to be as neutral as possible and bring it, this is fully an educational course. I'll use measurement as an example. So on the measurement side, we have one company, Geopath, that has a measurement methodology, and their measurement methodology is different from Place Exchange, the PerView product that Place Exchange has, and so I was very confident or very certain to make sure that I used interviews with someone for each of those companies so that we weren't, giving a single way of doing things, and in fact, we also brought in, because it's North America, from a measurement perspective, also Combe Canada, who has yet a third methodology for measurement. In the first course, I think it's probably important to point out that measurement is one of those tricky pieces that, as we expand into new markets and new areas of the world, measurement is sometimes defined by the capabilities within that market to measure an audience. So it would be very hard to have a worldwide single measurement methodology because it's, you know, what you can do in the United States is potentially a little different than what you can do in other regions. So if I'm going to be interviewed as an expert in one of these modules, do I need to be a financial supporter of the Academy, or would you pull in somebody who is absolutely the best person to talk about this? Jeff Gunderman: No, we would pull in the people who is the best people to talk to about this. We've done that on a couple of occasions, and those individuals have decided to sponsor. But if we feel that a topic needs to get covered, regardless of whether you pay money for sponsorship, we want to cover that topic, and we will cover that topic. Now, there are two sides to the platform. There's the educational piece, which starts with Digital and programmatic fundamentals as a course, and later this year, you'll see advanced courses come out on the sell side and the buy side. So you'll see more and more content and more courses come out. But on the other side are actual spotlights on very specific companies, and those are sponsored companies, and it is thought leadership with very specific people. Many of them sponsor, but not all are open sponsors, so we have an unbiased education piece. Then, we actually have another area where we show how real people and real companies are applying that education or that knowledge in the real world. So if I'm an ad tech company, being a sponsor, a supporter of this initiative also gives me the opportunity and the outlet, so to speak, of, kind of a central repository of good content about, you know, the industry that I'm active in, and if I want to produce thought leadership pieces, this is a great home for it, as opposed to maybe just my corporate blog that nobody's going to read? Jeff Gunderman: Exactly, and I like to think of it as a centralized area where the industry can come for content, thought leadership, company spotlights, all of this content that is not specific to an individual organization, that gives a really well-rounded view of what's happening in the latest news and education around digital and programmatic for the out of home space. You said, in passing, that it's going quite well, that there's a lot of demand for it. What was your initial reaction when you went to some of these organizations, and how do you kind of quantify that things are hopping?  Jeff Gunderman: A few answers to that question. The first one would be the fact that we have multiple competing companies across ad tech, agency associations, trade associations, and media operators. This tells you that it is supported by the industry, and I gauge success, not by ultimately who sponsors it, but really by the reaction of the people that are taking the course. So we've been live for just six weeks now. We've already had over 200 individuals register for the course. We've had almost 40 complete the course, and a large chunk of those 40 have provided feedback to us, their reaction to the course, and we've had nothing but very positive feedback from the industry, which alone helps. We've solicited a lot of the people that have gone through the course, just to make sure that if there's any, you know, your first few weeks, it's obviously the time when you test the integrity of the course and the platform that you're on and things like that. There have been a couple of little things that we've been able to fix. There was somebody who pointed out an audio issue with one of the videos that we were able to fix immediately. You know, one person pointed out a typo that we had. But now that all that is corrected, we're starting to get group registrations. So we're seeing companies come to us and say, we want to register our entire team, and so we actually have a new product now where you can register your team in what we call a group training, and we will register them all at one time for you and send invites out that they can log in with so they'll be auto-registered into the tool. They just have to set a password, and then we can send to the organization a report every week or two that shows the progress of each of their team members against completing the course, and we're finding that's been popular. We have two agencies and three media companies so far that have signed up their teams, and we're seeing increased interest in that. I've heard a number of times over the last several years from companies who've said, I appreciate what you do with Sixteen:Nine, You should know that when we onboard new employees, we tell them where the cafeteria is and all the nuts and bolts and we also tell them you need to be reading Sixteen:Nine every day. You need to subscribe to this and so on so you can get up to speed on the industry.  Do you see the time when this will just be kind of part of the normal routine of you've joined this ad tech company, there's your desk, there's this and that, and, here's your login for the DOOH Academy? Jeff Gunderman: I mean, I could only hope to have the amount of content that you do after seven years. I can imagine that the archives that you have are probably invaluable for anyone entering the industry.  But yeah, I'm fairly humble about that. I saw a need, and I created a platform, it took me a little longer to release the first course than I thought it would, but I'm rewarded by the fact that the industry seems to be responding very positively to it, and it would be fantastic to think that this would be part of someone's onboarding. Certainly, the goal of this is to fill a gap that exists in education, and as long as we produce the right content, I think the people will follow, and that's proving to be true so far in our first six weeks of being live with the course. Have you had the, “Oh, thank God, somebody's done this” responses? Jeff Gunderman: Quite a few actually, and I've had others that have said, I can't believe you did this because I know what an undertaking it is, certainly a little bit bigger of an undertaking than I had anticipated in the beginning, but, I think as you probably know from Sxiteen:Nine, once you've started to create enough content, it gets much easier. We're working on an advanced course right now for the sell side, and we're also working on, which we'll produce after that, an advanced course on the buy side, but. We are getting smarter at producing some of that content earlier on, and it's now much easier to pull it all together. It's interesting one of the modules that I didn't see in there that I think would be very helpful. I don't know where you position it, but is one on business fundamentals and viability. Because every week I still get phone calls or emails or press releases from companies who are putting screens over urinals and washrooms or in corporate aviation lounge, just all these, build it and they will come ideas that I just know from doing this for 25 years ain't going to work or a really tough go and it would be so beneficial if somebody could save themselves half a million dollars or whatever and take this course and go, you know what? Maybe that's not such a great idea.  Jeff Gunderman: I think it's a great idea for the course. I'm not sure I'm gonna tackle that one, but I get what you mean.  You log in, and it just says, “Don't!”  Jeff Gunderman: It'd be great to have like a little calculator of sorts where you enter these values, and it spits out a good business case or a bad business case. But I think you touch on a topic that topic, I don't know that education specifically is going to be able to tackle it, but you touched on a topic that's interesting, and that is that too many new media companies are saying, I'm going to deploy a bunch of new screens and the business will come. I do think you have to understand the statistics in the industry, where the demand is coming from an advertising perspective, and where you fit into that demand. I'll use a couple of resources. DPAA, for instance, has an immense amount of information, and, in fact, one of their recent reports said that there were 1. 25 million digital screens connected, from an advertising perspective, just in the United States, and most of those there's certainly a chunk that are billboards, but most of those, the 1.25 million is specifically place-based media screens that are sitting inside of that. Whether it's a gas station or a convenience store or a cinema lobby or what have you if you then go to the agencies and you talk about the demand for advertising, there are venue types that in their mind are a must or like to buy and there are venue types that are not even on their radar screen, and I think one of the challenges that new media companies face is that they don't take the time to do the research on where the demand is coming from.  I'll use one other example: the Out Of Home Advertising Association does a great job every year of producing a document that breaks down the industry. So I think we're in the United States, for instance, we're about $8.4 billion spent in out-of-home out of that, about a third is driven from digital out-of-home, whereas two-thirds is still driven from the static or printed side of the space. So you've got about $2.67 billion dollars, give or take that is, and then out of that, you have about 15 percent or about 450 million today that is driven programmatically, and one of the things we see is these smaller or upstart companies come out with digital screens, they think they're going to connect to programmatic, and then, they don't really have to sell a whole lot and that all this money is going to come, and they don't realize that in their business plan, they're saying I'm part of an 8. 4 billion industry, but the reality is there's only 450 million right now transacted programmatically. And so they're trying, and they're few screens, a hundred or a thousand screens that they've deployed to compete with 1.25 million screens, all connected, all competing for $450 million, and so when you start doing the numbers, it doesn't always add up quite as aggressively as probably their business plan does. Yeah. And, of that $450 million spent, for most of those media operators who are getting that money, it represents 15- 20% of their inventory at most. Is that pretty accurate? Jeff Gunderman: Well, programmatic is at most 15 percent of your total sales. You've got to have direct sales, and even half of the programmatic is not open exchange. It's coming in through private marketplace deals that someone has to physically set up with the agency or the trade desk. So, it is arguably closer to about 92-95% percent of your sales of any successful, healthy companies arw coming in through direct sales. So anybody who sets up a screen network and just thinks I'm going to put these up and I'll do it all through programmatic, I won't even need salespeople, and I'll just watch the money flow in, God bless you! Jeff Gunderman: It's not a good business model, no.  This has been great. We could chat forever, but I try to cap my time on these things. If people want to know more about your academy, where do they find you?  Jeff Gunderman: I appreciate that. It's as simple as going to www.doohacademy.com and if you want to take a course, the code DOOH20 will take 20% off the cost of the course. There's a ton of free content there and a growing amount of free content there as well. Wow. I think this is my first discount code on this podcast. All right, Jeff, that was terrific. Thank you! Jeff Gunderman: I appreciate the time.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When Terminal C was opened at Orlando's sprawling main airport, I was intrigued from a distance by the experiential digital features integrated into the new space. They got my attention because they were genuinely interesting, but also because they were put together by a company completely unfamiliar to me - Gentilhomme, from Montreal. In the time since that project went live, and won numerous awards, Gentilhomme (which is French for Gentleman) has also delivered experiential work for Nashville's airport. And the team is in the middle of a job for Houston's airport, and another airport on the US east coast that's NDA'd for now. I've been trying to organize a podcast chat with founder Thibaut Duverneix for a while now, and we finally got it together recently. We spoke about signature projects, and the ideation and design process. But we also get into the background of the company, which has roots in things like rock band tours, and has some direct ties to a couple of very well-known Montreal companies that are also all about experience - Cirque du Soleil and Moment Factory. NOTE - This interview was recorded before ISE, where the company picked up an armload of trophies at the global Digital Signage Awards. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Thibaut, thank you for joining me. You describe Gentilhomme as an Earth-based multimedia studio. What does that encompass? Because you guys are into a whole bunch of things.  Thibaut Duverneix: Hey David, It's a really good question. The idea is that the studio was built around my own practice as an artist and as a multimedia director at first, and I come from fine arts and computer science, so I like to do all things that are very different and, it's been very hard to describe what the studio does because the studio was built using that philosophy, and most of the time people would ask you, don't you want to specialize in anything, like video content and I was like, no, I don't, we like to do a lot of different things and they go from interactive sculpture or inflatables to building placemaking for airports and content for rock shows.  So I guess the best description was, around that, we want to create experiences, and the medium doesn't really matter.  So when people come into the office, they never quite know what they're coming into, right?  Thibaut Duverneix: Pretty much, but luckily, the casting at the studio is very broad, and everybody's like a Swiss Army knife.  How and why did it get started? Thibaut Duverneix: This is my second studio. I had another one before, and we were doing a lot of the first experiential work on the web in Flash at the time.  I had forgotten about Flash, for a good reason.  Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, exactly. But I was also doing music videos and rock shows, and eventually, I wanted to focus more on directing and doing things in real life with people. So I went my own way, and I built Gentilhomme more like my holding company in a way for what I was doing, and one-day Cirque du Soleil called me, and they had this show in France they wanted to do it for a theme park, which was a multimedia show while heavily relying on multimedia and I thought I was just going to direct it. but then they were like, no, we have five weeks, and we need turnkey. Can you also just make it happen? So I built a pop-up studio to do that, and then they said, Hey, do you want to do our next big top tour? And I said, yeah, and then I had a choice of do I keep doing my director work or do I build a studio with the people that I want, and do it the way I want it because it's never a one-man show, you need a team to do that, and that's what I did because I wanted to capitalize on my knowledge.  And Cirque is in Montreal as you are.  Thibaut Duverneix: Exactly. We're all children of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal.  Yeah. I was going to ask about that later, but we might as well get into it. What is it about Montreal, because, in my world, in multimedia digital signage world, there's Jean Théon, there's the big guy, Moment Factory, and there's also Arsenal Media and so on, and there's a real creative community in that city and it's particularly strong when it comes to the digital signage place-based work.  Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, absolutely. I always say it comes from Cirque, I don't know if I'm right. I think it's one reason Cirque du Soleil was the first to push the boundaries of what can be done, and it created a lot of side studios, people that actually build highly complicated stages and animatronics and stage equipment, but also people like Moment Factory, who started doing parties for Guilherme Liberté and stuff, and then, they turned out to be who they are now, but, I believe like Cirque was a big part of it and also all of the tech, there was like, a big tech ball, it started with the web and engineering, and now it's a lot of AI, and tax credits help with that a lot too, and there was a big VFX industry also. VFX is part of it. There are a lot of gaming companies in Montreal, right?  Thibaut Duverneix: VFX and gaming, yeah. Ubisoft is here, and all of the big VFX shops are here, too.  So at one point, for a while there, you were working with a Moment Factory. How long were you there?  Thibaut Duverneix: I was never there. I was always freelancing and part of the family. My first project with them was when I was the Interactive Multimedia Director for the Nine Inch Nails show when I was 28. I think that was the first time we started collaborating together., and I helped them with a lot of projects.  So when did you start Gentilhomme?  Thibaut Duverneix: 2014.  And where are you now with it? Is it still a freelance collaborative, or is it like a full company with offices and full-time staff and all that stuff?  Thibaut Duverneix: It's a full-on operation now. We are about 25 people full-time, and we expand depending on the projects. So obviously, when we do airports and things like this, we could be 80 on the project, but I like to keep it small and do only a few projects at a time. Everybody is very senior here. So that was my idea of the studio being small with highly competent people and doing only a few projects at a time. Yeah, it was, I went to Moment Factory's offices about, I'm thinking six years now, pre-COVID and I met with the folks there, and one really interesting comment that they made was they were so busy that they couldn't even deal with all the inbound opportunities that they had. So they were quite happy to pass along work for jobs that they either just didn't have the bandwidth to do, or weren't really in their wheelhouse or whatever. I'm curious if your company collaborates at all with your former contractor at Moment Factory.  Thibaut Duverneix: It's been a while, but we're always happy to collaborate. Montreal is a very small community.  Let's talk about some of the work that you do. We could talk about music videos and Cirque du Soleil and all those sorts of things, but given this is a digital signage podcast, we should probably talk about that. The projects that come to mind for me that I'm most familiar with would be Orlando Airport and then Nashville Airport. Can you describe both of them or describe one of them?  Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, absolutely. It was a game-changer for us. We entered the pandemic, we were finishing a stadium tour for Fall Out Boy, Weezer, and Green Day, and obviously, that got shelved in March, at the same time we won the RSP for the Orlando Airport Terminal C which was very big for us. For anybody, it would have been big, but especially for us, and yeah, we went full-on with it. We created more than five hours of content that's across all styles of content, there is a lot of live-action content, a lot of computer-generated content, and a lot of interactive content.  So, we designed and created all of the multimedia content across those three giant media features. I think ultimately they only built two, but there is one that's called the Movement Vault, which is a double-sided circular media feature. Each panel is about 4k inside of it, and outside, it's 4millimeters so I think they are about two gauges, and so outside it's only video, and we wanted to create that sense of place and oasis, something very calm and the trompe of a wall that would transform into a garden to invite you to get inside of it, and inside of it, we created a full 360 degree, interactive scenery in Unreal, that's using AI body tracking, so basically the people would use their movements to interact with the scenes, and we also created a lot of underwater 360 degrees, live-action footage of manatees and landmarks, from central Florida. On the second media feature, it's three giant flat LED screens that look like windows in the corridor, and here the idea was to create something that looks like a window with a lot of live action. So we created those trompe l'oeil effects where you really feel like you're looking through a window, and again, we wanted to showcase more the unknown of Orlando than the known. So we didn't really focus much on amusement parks and entertainment, and we really focused on nature and things that people don't necessarily expect from Central Florida.  Was there a brief of any kind or, like, how did you arrive at what was done there? Thibaut Duverneix: Oh yeah, for sure. So they had a multimedia architect, Marcella Sardi, and she was in charge of the vision, and the RFP came after. So she designed the media features, and she had a vision for what the content should be. As an architect, basically, the brief was the known and the unknown of Orlando, right? And so we went with that, and we collaborated with her very closely, and it turned out pretty good, I think.  It's challenging working in airports, is it not?  I'm assuming the lead times involved, but also some of the nuts and bolts stuff like getting access into post-security areas and so on. Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, it is, but it depends on how organized you are and how good of a relationship you have with the stakeholders. For Orlando, we did this through the pandemic. So that was already a challenge, and we went pretty far with it because we actually had our own servers hooked up to the airport's whole system. So we could work only using laptops and small workstations over our own WiFi. So we could work directly on the media feature in real-time. So getting all of that access was pretty intense because you need to get into the firewalls, the server rooms, and the badging. But it's all about organization and relationships and getting clearance. But yeah, it's a challenge, and you follow construction. So that's the hardest part because we work very fast and construction doesn't work fast so you have to align.  It sounds like the work that you and your team do is obviously driven by creative thinking and execution, but you couldn't just be multimedia producers. You need quite a bit of technical acumen, right?  Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, engineering is a big part of it because we do a lot of interactivity and so we have C++ programmers and now we work a lot in Unreal, but still we build our own pipelines and plug-ins.  You've had to do that because you're inventing experiences. When you go into these things and this is not functionality you can just buy off the shelf from existing software?  Thibaut Duverneix: Well, sometimes you do, but like we have our own tracking solution. For that reason specifically, not that we didn't want to buy it to build it. It just didn't really exist at the level we wanted it. So when it doesn't exist, you have to build it, but yeah, we're not necessarily a tech company, but we do develop tech out of necessity.  One of your, I don't want to call them competitors, but fellow companies that are doing that kind of work. Flopper actually came up with their own media servers because they had to design this stuff. Have you found the same thing where there's a technology that you've developed, or you could think, well, maybe we could remarket this? Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, it's always been a discussion. We talk about this a lot actually with Alex and they went into the Real Motion thing very early in the game, and now it's like they can't really go back, they're already pushing this, but we are not into the product business. We're a creative company. Basically, we have two products, if you want to call them that. We have a show in Montreal for interactive installation, and we have a tracking system, but we are trying not to sell that as a product. We would license this for projects and we would give it to friends or other artists that need it because It's boring to build that, but we don't want to be in that business because it's a very different business. Yeah. You're going to very different kinds of trade shows and things, if you're going at all.  Thibaut Duverneix: Exactly.  Can you talk a little bit about the Nashville airport? Because that's also very experiential, but quite a bit different from what you did at Orlando.  Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, absolutely. So the Nashville airport, they actually built that huge screen, on top of security, TSA, and they didn't really know what to do with it. Once they built it, they knew they were going to use it for signage and for feeds and stuff and advertising, but then they were wondering, should we do something experiential? And they reached out, and we started thinking about what we could do, and we actually did this very quickly because they were very far in the process and they never really thought about the strategy about content. So I think we did that in 11 months, probably from strategy to delivery, and so we have them doing all of the strategies about placemaking and identity and what would make something compelling for Nashville.  But also, you don't want to create a bottleneck because it's TSA. So we wanted to create some form of engagement and identity but not break the flow of TSA.  So you didn't want people stopping and watching for 10 minutes.  Thibaut Duverneix: Exactly. Also, we had to incorporate all of the signage stuff, such as the feeds, the widgets, and also the advertising. So we designed grids, systems, and branding guidelines. So they would have everything that they need to do all of that, right? So it's not like you just do a full takeover, and then they have the other stuff we wanted to make it. It's integrated as an ecosystem, so we also had them design their media system because they didn't really have something strong in place. So we worked with the engineers to recommend some solutions for them. It's interesting. I've heard this story many times through the years, and it's still a little bit surprising that you have organizations that will make a very ambitious and expensive capital investment in a big video wall, and they're well along the way with it, and then they start thinking, okay, what are we going to put on this thing? Thibaut Duverneix: It depends, right? Now we're working with the Houston airport, and they bought it pretty early in the process. I think people are getting better at it because they see what other people are doing, and they're like, we should not wait until the last minute because these things take time, and people get educated about it. So that's good, but yeah, for sure, sometimes they go on with the program because the program follows construction.  They just go step by step. They know they need a video wall. They work with the architects, they work with the engineers, they build it, they design it. It's state of the art, it's beautiful. It's Nanolumens, two millimeters, whatnot, but then yeah, they would think about the content strategy at the end. Because you've now done a couple of airports and you're working in Houston, have you found that the simple fact that you've done these leads to other opportunities to do other airports? Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, absolutely, and also, we want to do those because I think we got pretty good at it because we understand the problems on the technical side, but also on the user experience side. So it's something very interesting for us, and we really like to be immersed in different cultures, and that's what I love about Apple because that's the first thing you know when you enter a city, and that's the last memory you get, and if we get a chance to create something unique for every airport, I think it's very interesting, and you get to work with local people and to understand their community and who they are and what the city is about and I think it's very exciting. I assume airports are also a good kind of client to have just simply because they have billion-dollar budgets for terminal expansions, and they can work your component into those kinds of budgets in a way that maybe a retailer or a commercial property owner who also putting up a big video wall, they might look at the process and the overall cost of doing what you guys do and turn white, like, there's not that many end-user clients who can do what Nashville and what Orlando did, right?  Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, it's also very different because the problem is volume because, if you're doing airports, you need to create a lot of content, enough content so it doesn't feel repetitive because people stay there a lot, and there's a lot of dwelling time and we like to do high-end content. We don't want to do shit content. So the challenge is how to maintain production value across the board because the budget might seem big, but it's not because you have to do so much at such a high resolution because the screens are becoming crazy like you get 1.8 millimeters across the whole corridor so it's like a lot of pixels to push.  So the challenge is maintaining quality and quantity, whereas when you do retail, you might spend the same amount of money for a couple of minutes, right? So it's just a very different approach.  What's the process, and as you said, the approach, when you get engaged in a big project like this? Where do you start, or what are the first questions you're asking besides, “Do you have the budget for this?”  Thibaut Duverneix: Well, usually, they do have a budget most of the time, and you retrofit it within their budget. But not always, no, we're trying to find the identity, what are you about, and what do you want to communicate? Then, we can start building a strategy around placemaking and identity. So that's the main focus, and that's something you do very closely with the clients, and they, usually, they have never done this before, or maybe they've done it, but on the marketing side, so it starts from marketing most of the time, and we try to understand better the mission and build from that. I've seen some of the airport projects when there's PR issued about it, there's talk about how this is highly experiential and gives people the sense of joy that they're flying and so on. It all gets very ethereal at times, and I wonder how you define experiential, what it means, and what you're trying to deliver in these kinds of environments in terms of a feeling. Thibaut Duverneix: It really depends on where the media feature would be because, again, if you are TSA, you want to make sure that you get things flowing through, and you want to try to create this sense of place and identity, but not go too far on entertainment and engagement but if you are post-security waiting for your flight, then you're trying to get a lot of engagement, especially if it's around retail. So you get people excited and feel good about waiting for their flight, and if you do that, they are more likely to go into the retail store. So, to me, that's the KPI. It's like if we can calm people and make them feel good about being there because it's very hostile, the environment, and if you do that, you help the airports greatly.  Yeah, I've certainly heard a number of times people talking about the dynamic of gate huggers and people who get through security and then they go immediately to their gate, and they don't want to leave the gate because they irrationally think if I leave, the plane's going to board and leave without me. And that doesn't happen, and the airports want them to go shopping if they've got 75 minutes, go get something to eat, or go experience the Moment Vault if they're in Orlando.  Thibaut Duverneix: Exactly, and that's our own KPI for the Moment Vault, I want people to miss their flight. That's what I wanted. I wanted people to forget what time it was. I don't know if it happened yet. I should check.  You want to be careful about that, they'll sue people about anything in the United States.  Thibaut Duverneix: No, but the idea was we wanted to create good engagement so people forget about time and have fun with it. But we were very careful about how we designed it. Even with the engagements, we made sure that all of the interactive stuff wasn't always playing. So you don't have that problem, actually, of missing the flight. Do you have a sense at all of what works and what doesn't in terms of creativity on a big screen?  Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah. When speed scales, colors, and blinking stuff, like it's to me, when you design for spaces, it's the opposite of doing a rock show, actually, it's the complete opposite job. So you want to make sure that everything that you create feels architectural, at least we do. So we work very closely with the architects and we want to make sure that all of the lighting that is physical would match what's virtual. So we don't want to think about those screens as screens. We want to think about it as a part of the architecture. So whatever we create, we're trying to be very careful about that, which makes it the opposite of doing a movie. So, you're most likely, if you're shooting live action, your camera is not going to move. You want to make sure that your perspective feels accurate in terms of scales; you want to do things slowly enough so it's not distracting. So yeah, we're trying to really focus on those techniques to make it compelling within the space. Yeah, that's interesting. I wouldn't have thought in those terms, but I guess if you're coming off of doing all the backdrops and everything for Fall Out Boy, and there are all kinds of things happening behind the band, you can't do that in an airport or an office tower lobby.  Thibaut Duverneix: Well, no, that would be crazy because that's the thing when you do a rock show. You would use your surfaces as lights most of it is a canvas for set extension, but it's also a light. So you can play with it in that way. But when you're in space for a permanent installation, you need to think like an architect. So it's very different.  Yeah, I've written a lot about how LED technology is maturing to a level that it can now be an architectural design decision, like this can be the full bulkhead of an airport area over the TSA screening area, that sort of thing and I'm curious if you watch how that's evolving and you're intrigued by things like LED embedded in glass and so on.  Thibaut Duverneix: Oh, yeah. We went to all those trade shows, and we came to work a lot with those elements on the past projects and on the future projects, and that product is evolving so quickly. And that's how they think. They think about any LED as part of the architecture, and I think their product is becoming very stunning, it doesn't look like a picture anymore. It really feels cinematic, and it's not aggressive. The light is very diffused, and it feels really soft and nice.  I know you reference how you're now working on some aspects of the airport in Houston. Are there other jobs that you're working on that you can talk about?  Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, there is another one on the East Coast, but I can't talk about it yet. Another airport?  Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah.  Interesting. So the same kind of idea as the other ones. Thibaut Duverneix: This one is a bit different, but they're all different. But yeah, high-end content, placemaking, but different types of media features.  All right. If people want to know more about your company, how do they find you?  Thibaut Duverneix: I've not been very good at that. You've managed somehow anyway.  Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah. We are trying, but we're small and not really good at marketing. Hopefully, we will get more known, and we want to get more engaged. So yeah, our website is a good place to start, and we are doing more and more Trade shows and events, and we're going to be present in Spain also next week, and we're trying to be at all of the events and make sure that people start to know us more.  Right, and they can find you at Getilhomme.com. I will put the link in the blog post so people who can't spell Getilhomme for the life of them will be able to find it that way.  Thibaut Duverneix: Thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate your time. That was terrific. Congratulations on the work you've done to date. It's turned a lot of heads.  Thibaut Duverneix: Thank you so much. That's what we want to do.  All right. Take care.  Thibaut Duverneix: You too. Bye bye.  

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The UK startup PassageWay operates with the interesting mission of using technology that nudges people to make well-informed and more sustainable decisions about how they get from A to B. That's done by thinking through and developing the presentation layer for Real-Time Passenger Information content that's then run on digital signs, most notably for the bus systems around the city of London. PassageWay's business model is - in simple terms - taking the rich, real-time data available for routes and stops and making it presentable and digestible for transport authorities, like Transport For London, which pays the start-up to do so. The logical notion is that the more that good, real-time information is made available to people, the more the transport services will be used. While London Underground stations are well-equipped with information and the services are pretty predictable, there's not as much available to the millions who use less-predictable surface transport services like the iconic double-decker red buses. I had a good chat about all this recently with PassageWay co-founder Chris Johns. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Chris, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what PassageWay is all about?  Chris Johns: Thanks so much for inviting us to your podcast today. PassageWay is all about generating demand for public transport by leveraging real-time information. We do this by putting it onto digital signs that are displayed on host-supplied screens and typically these screens only require a modern browser to display the digital sign.  You made a point of saying the host supplied. There's been a history through the years of companies who've done things like put in the infrastructure, the screens, and so on and then run content on them with the idea that content would be Interrupted so to speak by advertising. You're not going down that path.  Chris Johns: No, we're not. Typically those sorts of plays are similar to JC Decaux or Clear Channel who have long had this relationship with transport authorities whereby they will fund the deployment of bus shelters in return for an ad revenue share. We supply transport for London with digital signs that are displayed at bus shelters but also within their other infrastructure like bus stations. But really we're more citywide about putting digital signs into places such as schools, hospitals, workplaces, offices, and such in order to generate demand from the sort of non-traditional locations and encouraging the people within those locations to consider public transport. So this doesn't sound like a traditional business, you said, this is about generating demand to use public transport services and so on versus, more traditionally, this is about making money somehow or other.  Chris Johns: Yeah. I think that's the difference, a lot of those traditional plays actually put the real-time information secondary to their primary objective which is to earn revenue from the display of ads. And to my mind, that means a poor customer experience and the poor customer experience means reduced demand. If you think about traditional bus shelters, they are actually incredibly complex for many people trying to navigate the public transport information. If you're coming to London, for example, trying to find out which is the right bus? Is it going to go to your preferred stop? How long is it going to take? Is there any disruption information? If you don't have it, it will make you want to go and choose a different mode of transport. So, you probably take a taxi or you may end up using your own car, for example. Actually what we're trying to do is to show people that public transport is really easy to use. It's really accessible. It can get you from A to B pretty fast. And if you're aware of the onward travel information from the stop you're trying to get to, then actually, you can make the whole journey much easier and less stressful, for many people. So this almost seems like a community initiative but there is a business model behind this, right?  Chris Johns: Yeah, there is. The business model is pretty straightforward, to be honest. We are paid by the transport authority or their contract partners and our job is to provide these digital signs and the digital signs generate demand. So in a different way of thinking, you might consider the real time information as being the best form of advertising for public transport. Certainly better than a static advert, in my opinion, anyway.  Your company's efforts are to aggregate the data, make sure it's handled accurately and always up to date, and so on. Why would transport for London not do that themselves?  Chris Johns: Yeah, they do. Transport for London is the world's largest integrated transport network and they have the global leading data strategy. And they're famed the world over for their open API strategy. That means we can access their data and we pretty much have unfettered use of that data. And so do many other developers as well and we can Be sure that the data we've got is true and accurate. What we do is that we take that information and we plot it around a particular location and we bring it together with a legible London-style wayfinding map, where we plot the access points onto it and then we bring it all together into a sort of nice looking digital sign that's easy to understand and act upon.  So we're not generating data or we're not modifying data, all we're doing is bringing data together into an easy-to-understand format.  So you're doing the presentation layer that in theory, transport for London could do themselves but you're good at it. it's not what they want to focus on. So they're happy to work with you to do that part of it.  Chris Johns: That's right. Yeah. We are a supplier to TFL and they use lots of other different tech suppliers whether it's to build their award winning TFL go app or to build bus shelters whatever it may be. They have lots of different suppliers bringing their individual skill sets into play and that's basically what we do. But I think that one of the things that we do bring to the party because we're a tech startup is innovation and the ability to pivot quickly and come up with sort of entrepreneurial new ideas that we can bring into play and throw them out to TFL and say, listen, what do you think about this? And so we can move quite quickly.  Did you have to go to them to sell into this or is your company kind of a result of being in discussions with them and starting the company because this opportunity existed? Chris Johns: It's a mix between the two actually. So TFL actually issued a tender some time ago that we want to produce the platform and we've taken it on from there and given it a life of its own and extended the service beyond London as well. So working with other transport authorities and other partners outside of London.  So this is audio, so it makes it a little difficult to visualize things. But can you give me some sense of how this manifests itself within the transport system? And then in public and private buildings.  Chris Johns: Okay. I'll give you a couple of examples. For example, in every bus station across London, there are digital totems. And those digital totems are a bit like an airport or a train station where you've got a central totem and it shows all the services where they're going and whereabouts within the bus station they're leaving from and if there's any disruptions. So we look after all of those for London. Another example would be smart bus shelters, whereby you could have a large format digital screen with detailed route maps for each of the services that are running via that bus shelter with real time information on all those routes plotted not on a fixed JPEG of a route but actually plotted live onto a legible London style map. With onward time estimation to reach all the onward stops, onward travel information such as the tube status, any disruption notifications and more so that people can quite easily contextualize their journey and see if it's going to be running smoothly all the way through. Another example, could be at a bus stop itself. So across London, there are about 18,000 bus stops and only about 2000 bus shelters. So only about 2000 of these locations have any real time information. So what we can do for those ones is put in QR codes and customers can scan the QR codes and open up a real time digital sign on their personal device with no registration, no login, no heavy download. It's just a purely web based solution that shows all the upcoming departures for that particular stop with detailed route information, onward stop information et cetera and then links to download the official apps. So it's like an interstitial page where it's easy for everyone to access. Hopefully you're going to convert more people into downloading the official apps. Now the official app is the TFL official app or yours?  Chris Johns: No, we don't do apps. I'm afraid. One of the points about what we're doing is about trying to make everything as open and as accessible as possible. So there is no registration, there's no login, there's no download. All you need Is a modern web browser and you can access the information. We don't ask anything from the customers. We don't track them. We don't do anything really about that.  Yeah. That's one of the problems when you go to an unfamiliar city and you decide I'm going to use their transport system. You go to the app store to find the app for the mass transport system in that city. And there's five or six of them and you don't know which one is official or which one's riddled with ads or not updated or God knows what. Chris Johns: Yeah. In London, I can't really speak for other cities because our primary focus is London, that's our area of expertise. But there are hundreds of thousands of people who are digitally excluded. People who don't have smartphones at all and then there is a whole another segment that are extremely low digital users and I think in London, there's about 2 million of those, according to a Lloyd's report. You've got about 2.5 million people that are not going to be using smartphones or not downloading apps and you've got to provide real time information to those people because those are also a core audience for the transport authority because they tend to be looking at the demographic. They match perfectly the sort of TFL bus user type. But at the moment they're somewhat excluded from the service or the latest developments of promoting those services.  Is the focus more as a result on road transport, buses and so on, as opposed to the London underground? Because the underground has maps. It's got covered areas and everything else. It's easier to convey information.  Chris Johns: That's right. Like train stations and tubes, they're fairly straightforward. You go onto the platform, you take a train going one way or the other way or if you go to a train station, it's all linear. But if you're taking buses or you want to go get a bicycle, they're within the built environment itself. And they could be going pretty much any direction. And you really need to know where the best location is for you to find your particular service and then how long you're going to wait and if there's any problems with that particular service. Also the other thing is that the tube services are linear again. They're always getting the district line, for example and are always going to go to those particular routes, one way or the other. They might stop slightly earlier but generally, they're always going to follow that same path. And if you wait one minute, then the next one's coming along for two or three minutes. So what we do is that we just show on the tube status. We show if there's any problems on any particular line. And then we say all of the lines are running fine, which is the sort of TFL standard approach to displaying the statements  Yeah. This year I've spent a couple of weeks in London, doing interviews and then I was there semi holidaying as well and I was struck by the amount of real time information that you could get on. I was taking the Elizabeth line more than anything else and it was terrific in terms of telling me, I definitely don't want to go on the Circle line right now. Chris Johns: Yes. the Northern line.  The really old ones. Chris Johns: Yeah, some of them are better than others, to be honest. Also you've got to pick the right one. It's freezing in London at the moment and some of them have heating and some of them don't. Like in the summer, some of them have air con and some of them don't as well. We don't flag that as much. I couldn't tell you offhand which ones are which. Toko on here is stifling.  Chris Johns: Yeah. It could be useful information to many people.   What you're doing is a little reminiscent of a US company called TransitScreen.  Chris Johns: Yeah, I know. I've heard of TransitScreen. Yeah. They would sell a service into a building and they would also layer in things like the availability of Rideshare, Dockless bikes. I'm not sure what their status is right now but probably scooters as well. Do you do any of that? Chris Johns: Not at the moment. It is something that we are quite interested in. But we are dependent on the data sources that are available to us. And obviously we are primarily funded by TFL as well. Our modus operandi is to really promote TFL services. When we've looked at it before there are Lime and Forest e-bikes for example, across London. But they don't actually have an open API that we can access. The other thing I think separates us from the transit screen service, I think they've rebranded actually now. But I think they don't tend to have maps or contextual maps on their screens. They tend to be very linear in terms of saying information is available on this particular site type of service at this particular place. And that it's 500 meters where you have to go and work out which direction it is, whereas in London, we've got what's called the legible London wayfinding scheme. So across London, you find all these Totems which are just flat totems, they're not real time information. But they've got localized maps with all the local highlights on it. So, there's a sort of native way of expecting maps and how they should appear to people as they're moving through the built environment that we've tried to replicate. Ultimately, what we'd like to do is to take over those totems and convert them from being static information locations to being real time digital totems with wayfinding public transport information and other information as well.  I suspect the barriers, there are steady advances in e-paper. As that gets better versus using LCD or things like that require a lot of energy to be visible in daylight.  Chris Johns: Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head there or bleakly by saying, really the issue is cost and technology. There are hundreds of legible London totems around London. Not all of them have power nearby and the cost to convert each and every one of them would be very substantial but if we can bring in as technology advances and things become cheaper, solar power and other sort of lower energy burn options come into play then that's where we're hoping that there's an opportunity. So, I think I saw you guys have your offices or technical location and the Battersea area. If the Battersea power station which is now a kind of a multi use mall and other things, wanted to put your content on a large screen in their main access areas, would they need to do what's involved? Chris Johns: It's really quite straightforward. They just need to install a screen of any particular size, it can be small or super large. We put a 75 inch screen into an office complex, Paternoster Square, just a week or so ago. But you can go for pretty much any size screen. The larger ones tend to be ethernet connected rather than Wi Fi connected. As long as that screen has browser capability then we can deploy a digital sign onto it. And it will be suitable for displaying both small scale and large scale. So you could have it within a stadium. If you've been to the power station, they've got the huge sort of warehouse-y style engine rooms there which are now full of shops but you could put one at the end of one of those engine rooms and it would look fantastic.  Yeah. I was there three-four months ago. It's a great reworking of that building. Outside they could really use wayfinding but that's somebody else's problem.  Chris Johns: Yeah. Also there's boats there as well. So Uber has taken over the boats in London. So, unfortunately they no longer provide data onto the TFL data feed. And so we're trying to work with them to get data from them. But at the moment, they're not included within the TFL API feed. I'm understanding this correctly, there's a URL per geo-specific site.  Chris Johns: That's right.  And if it was a digital sign in a building that was also showing, if we're using the Battersea Power Station as an example, also showing sales promotions for some of the retail tenants, could your information be scheduled in or does it need to be on there full time? Chris Johns: No, it doesn't need to be full-time. Obviously, we're very aware that digital screens need to pay for themselves and often that's through advertising. Our content can be part of a playlist and run for 15-20 seconds every 40 seconds or whatever the host decides is best. So, we're working on another project at the moment which is actually something very similar to that, whereby the content will rotate with other content about walking routes, heritage and other information that takes to a particular place. Because obviously, public transport information is not the only thing that's of interest to people as they're moving through the built environment. But it's one of the time sensitive things that is important to them.  Because it's web based information, is it responsive? Chris Johns: Yeah, We do smartphone friendly signs as well but usually they're going to be QR code based. So, someone will scan a QR code and then it will open up a smartphone or other personal device friendly version. Some of the other signs that we've designed particularly for larger format digital signage screens. So what I've seen examples of was a portrait mode screen but you could do a landscape screen, no problem.  Chris Johns: Oh yeah. We've got loads of them. It's roughly 50-50 at the moment in terms of deployment between landscape and portrait. I don't really have a preference. I think they look good. I think the one we put in last week into Paternoster Square was a portrait and I think it looks really quite nice in portrait style.  And have you done the design and everything to mirror or parrot the transport for London colors and so on? Chris Johns: We've built it to meet the TFL brand guidelines. So that was very important. Obviously, because we're paid by TFL and the map is styled to look as close as possible to the legible London guidelines but without copying it. We use a service called Mapbox to do that which allows us to play with the layers and the design of the layers on the maps very efficiently. And we actually did a project for Melbourne as well, Transport for Victoria in Australia where we came up with a similar whole range of concepts for Melbourne and again using their sort of legible Melbourne guidelines or Transport for Victoria guidelines with their branding and their mapping as well. So is there a consulting wing to what you do as well?  Chris Johns: Basically we can provide just consulting but really what we're hoping to do is to build long term relationships with transport authorities where we can deploy the platform, make the signs available across their estate and out to their community. And if that option is available to us then we'll do the consulting bundled into a longer term agreement with them.  But it's not fundamental to your offer?  Chris Johns: No. No, not at all.  My next question is, are you working outside of London? So you're in Australia. Are you elsewhere as well? Chris Johns: So, we're one of the winners of a global innovation tender for Transport for Victoria and we developed a whole range of concepts for them. Unfortunately, their data wasn't quite a state as yet to enable the concepts to be deployed. So that one very much watches this space. We've also had discussions with others, both, in Europe and also in North America as well. We're quite keen on working internationally. I think on the international side, we're much better when we work with a bigger technology partner. So, usually with transport authority tenders, they put them out there and there's big organizations which pitch for them. We're typically too small to pitch for them but we can go in with those larger organizations and bring that element of innovation and entrepreneurialism and some design to give them an extra edge in their tender over and above everyone else. So you might be going with an IBM or somebody like that?  Chris Johns: Yeah. The big one in America is VIX Technology and they're a nice bunch of guys. But we've also partnered previously with Trapeze which is in the UK. And also, there's a one in the UK who we work with very well called True Form Engineering as well. We've done stuff with them both in London and outside of London as well.  You mentioned at the start that you're working with the London authority which has a world reputation for its data API and everything else. And you also mentioned that Melbourne isn't quite at the same level. Is that a big challenge when you look at other jurisdictions? Chris Johns: Yeah, totally. Basically, the world is changing and it's changing very rapidly. The data is becoming less of a problem. But one of the problems that remains is the cost of data which means that actually using our service may be prohibitive to smaller towns or organizations outside of London. With the CFL API, we have free Access to that but if it was outside of London, for example, in Bristol, then we would have to partner with a third party data provider. And there are a small number of those that can provide that service. But it's not free and their costs are extensive. And then we have to layer our costs on top of that and it may be that for that transport authority which they look at that and say, we can't do that sort of cost at the moment. Indeed somewhere Bristol actually used to have their own API and then took it offline. Because they said, we can't justify the cost of maintaining this open API strategy which to my mind is insane because surely the biggest way of generating demand for public transport authority is telling people what services there are there. And you can only do that if you've got real time information. So if you suddenly say to all the developers and even your own services, we're not going to have an API anymore. It just means that you're going to have a natural impact on demand.  I don't know if this is a simple answer or way too involved to even get into but I'm curious if I'm a transport authority, let's say in Kansas city, Missouri, Winnipeg, Manitoba, or Munich, Germany. Do you need the shape and structure of data to make this workable?  Chris Johns: It's what we call a JSON API and then documentation around it and we'll take it from there. So, most of the APIs follow a common standard these days and we can work with any of them, really. We've not done any multi-language so digital sign designs as yet. So we do need to consider the elements of user experience for trying to work in something like Japanese, for example, would be challenging for us at the moment because we'd have to consider how they interpret information which is different to how we might interpret information in the UK. But somewhere like Missouri and Munich would be fairly straightforward for us.  Okay. So if people want to know more about your organization, where do they find you?  Chris Johns: So the best thing to do is to look at our website, which is at passage-way.com, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm quite chatty on LinkedIn, and I post a fair amount, and also the company is on LinkedIn as well. That's how I found you.  Chris Johns: Yeah, and the more the merrier, really.  All right. Chris, thank you very much for spending some time with me.  Chris Johns: Thank you. Have a great day.  

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT A LOT of digital signage software companies have identified education as a key vertical market, but very few have the history, experience and platform for education like Carousel Digital Signage, which got into the business in 1997 because of an ask from a public school system. I had a really good chat, one that flew by, with Eric Henry, the president of Carousel, which is the digital signage side of a larger Minneapolis company called Tightrope Media Systems. The Tightrope side of the business focuses on broadcast. In our chat, Eric and I get into the opportunities and challenges of working with K-12 schools, what typically goes in, and the types of content that help create a sense of community. He has some interesting thoughts about taking marketer's approach to messaging in schools, and getting beyond the predictable. We also touch towards the end on the higher ed market, which has some core similarities in terms of need, but is also quite different. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Eric, thank you for joining me. Happy New Year. Eric Henry: Happy New Year.  I've done a podcast in the past with your colleague, JJ, but it's been a few years. For those who don't know much about Carousel, can you give me the background? I know that you grew out of tightrope media systems. Some people will know that, but others won't. You've been around since 1997, maybe not you personally but the company.  Eric Henry: Yeah, correct. Personally, I haven't been at the company since 97, but I've certainly been around since 1997. But yeah, Carousel started out as Tightrope Media Systems, actually still a division of Tightrope Media Systems.  So there are two divisions of the company, Carousel, which is the digital signage group and then Cablecast, which is actually our community television broadcast, part of the company and so I actually run the Carousel business. We did start in 97. 1996-97, It's debatable in terms of paperwork and those types of things, but after a long time, it actually came out of the education space. So, our first customer was Wayzata Public Schools in Minnesota for Carousel some 26 years ago, and we've been in that space for quite a long time. Obviously signage lends to many other vertical markets, so we are certainly in other verticals but our founder story is rooted in the education space  And going way back to the late nineties, what was a school district looking for at that point? And is it pretty much what they're looking for today? Eric Henry: Quite a bit different today. So back in the late nineties, there were certainly much more tube televisions and we could update lunch menus and those types of things and that was really very early days of putting content on screens that wasn't broadcast.  So that was really the early days where schools were looking for a solution that wasn't really hard because there were only a couple of things that could actually put content on screens but they were fairly prohibitive because a lot of them were designed for much more retail, graphic intensive folks and not necessarily teachers. Right. Yeah. I remember back to the mid to late nineties, there were early-stage quasi digital out of home companies that were in the business of going to school districts and schools in general and saying, Hey, we'll put a TV in the classrooms of your school and you can run school messaging on there. But by the way, there's going to be advertising there too, to pay for the technology. That's a model that didn't work.  Eric Henry: No, it did not. And I think we've really been trying to find our way as an industry, for quite a long time. If you look at the early days, I remember being at a trade show and there were two higher eds from the same state. And I asked them why they wanted to do a digital signage project and the answer was basically because the other one was going to do it. So, that's not a very compelling reason, nor is that really a sustainable industry. If we don't really understand what the value is that we're going to bring, why are we doing this thing? And I think that has really been a long journey for us and we've been searching and wrestling with that question. We did a signage project because it was cool and because nobody else was doing it or because we wanted to put something on these new flat panel displays we wanted to buy but it's very different now in terms of what's important and what schools are thinking about when they're putting content on screens. And what a K-12 environment does versus what a higher ed environment does can be very different, correct?  Eric Henry: They can be the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is the same. How you reach that goal may look a bit different, right? In a K-12 versus a higher ed. I would say one of the major things, so the thing that is the same, what we see and this is true for any organization, our corporate customers as well in the retail space. This idea that people feel connected to their community, like the heart of us, is what we can do to give an organization tools to keep their people connected. Ironically, we're suggesting more use of technology but using technology to actually bring people together in a relationship face to face. So the more that people are aware of what's happening within their school and things they can participate in. So extracurricular clubs or the sports scores from last night from the football team or the auditions for the play coming up. Those types of things or recognizing people within their community is really creating more sense of community through visual communication is really at the core of what K-12s do and higher eds do. Now it varies a little bit. Higher ed, for example, the big challenge is getting students on campus and getting students registered for classes and those types of things. So the campus visits weekends and promotes what that university has to offer. So it is a bit more of a marketing tool for prospective students and those types of things, when you're trying to attract them to campus. And then the signage becomes a tool that says, Hey, you're in the residence hall, just so you know, seven o'clock on Thursday, this math club is meeting or you can go into the writing lab and get a review of your paper. So, that is how across education it is creating community and creating awareness of all the services and things that we're providing to help you be successful. So, let's talk first about K-12. What does that environment or what does the build typically look like for a school within a larger school district? And I guess I'm also asking, do you sell to a school district or is it school by school? Eric Henry: We certainly have had both approaches. So in the K-12 space, what is interesting is it really depends on the district. And now there are districts that have standardized on the Google ecosystem. There are school districts that have standardized on the Apple ecosystem and there are school districts that actually split between Google ecosystem and primary grades and Apple for higher secondary schools. So, in terms of environments that we see, we see typically a Google or an Apple environment or a mixed environment between those two, sometimes Microsoft.  So does that matter to you?  Eric Henry: It matters a little bit in terms of how we're thinking about a deployment, not a ton to us directly at the Carousel. We obviously have to be mindful of customers' choices, right? So, there are certainly relationships that we have that are more ingrained or stronger or support devices that we have. We do have opinions around what devices we feel work best but if you've already made device choices, as Carousel, we need to work to support those devices. So with that said… In a Chrome OS environment.  Eric Henry: Yes. But the qualifier on that environment, is it to the same level of support and performance as the Apple ecosystem or the BrightSign ecosystem? No. They run on Chrome but we don't invest top tier resources in terms of making sure that's the prime environment. And honestly, because we don't have a lot of customers running on Chrome. That's what it comes down to for us. So as far as a K-12, what we see most often is common area signage and so not necessarily in the classroom. So when you ask a school, Hey, are you doing digital signage? They would say, yes, we have five devices in common areas. So in each of the main hallways or however they break out their building. Sometimes they've had it at a district but many times it started at one school because there was a champion within a school. Sometimes we have a district that has three or four different solutions. Some every once in a while, we have district-wide initiatives and we prefer that because whether you're going with us or a competitor, we think it makes more sense to think about your communication strategy more holistically. So it's a little bit challenging if you have three or four different solutions. And I would say we see more individual schools choosing than we see full districts choosing. We've seen mostly common areas and sometimes, Hey, can we do something in the lunchroom? And what we've really tried to encourage schools to be thinking about is how can we get into the classroom? beyond the common areas because the reality is when I observed my kids in school they're cruising through the hallway as quickly as they can to get to class. So, there wasn't a lot of dwell time in common areas unless you're at lunch. So how can we get into the classroom in a way that's affordable?  And that's been a big challenge over the years with the devices that we have and especially the mix. As I mentioned, there's Google and there's Apple. There's also Lots of other devices that we see in the classroom. We have Immersive, we have Screenbeam, all these other multi-purpose devices that we see in classrooms, we've really tried to think about how we can lean in and support that. And I've wondered about the other devices like Immersive and Screenbeam and Zoom rooms and so on. There seems to be a marketing effort for the schools to have this in their classrooms because you can not only use it for collaboration and teaching and so on but in downtimes, it can be used as digital signage messaging, a kind of screensaver-ish mode. But I've wondered, does that actually happen?  Eric Henry: No. The short answer is no. The reality is it's cost-prohibitive. So if we wanna get into a little bit of where we're going as a Carousel. When you look at school districts, a K-12 or a higher ed, they have to be very mindful of their budgets and how we as digital signage manufacturers, CMS providers have priced our products historically. You have a dedicated media player and we price per media player. So anytime we go to a classroom environment, you start talking about a 100 or 200 or 500 per school, which pretty quickly gets the school district out of the budget. So this is where as Carousel, we've backed it up. And so talking about what is a K-12 or a higher ed trying to accomplish. I did have an opportunity to go and meet with a bunch of higher ed leaders and really hear from them what their struggle is and what they're trying to do and overwhelmingly the theme was, Hey, kids don't read emails, kids aren't engaged. They don't really know what's going on. How can we reach these kids? That's the question they had for us and how can you be part of helping us with that? And the interesting thing is there's already like 15 ways we can communicate with people, right? We have Slack teams, all the different higher ed little solutions for back and forth communications with students like Patio and all these other ones and we have digital signage and we have Moodle and Blackboard and all these others learning management systems.  So thinking about all of those things, I backed up and none of those higher ed leaders were saying, boy, the thing that I really need is digital signage. It's going to solve all of my problems and so that was very clear to us. So when we started asking the question, what does my overall communication strategy look like as a higher ed leader? What do I think about my communications as campaigns? Like retailers think about marketing campaigns. Here's all the places I'm going to place this campaign. Here's when I'm going to place it. Here's who needs to see it. Here's the call to action. When we start thinking about communication for a higher ed or a K-12 in that way, we understand that signage is one part of that much bigger communication. And it moved us to this idea of let's think more about the audience that we're communicating with than the number of devices they're necessarily on. So, as far as where we're going in the future, we're going to a K-12 or in a higher ed and saying, you need to communicate within your classrooms to all of your students. And you identify your student body as one audience. You should have an audience feed for students and if you need to communicate with parents, that should be a different audience that you're thinking about and even switching the value proposition of carousel and how we price based on that concept of saying, how many audiences, unique messages do you need to create to meet with your people? And don't worry so much about whether that's a 1000 people or 5,000 people thinking about what audience you have because the interesting thing about signage and the way that it's always been is the more successful you as an organization are, the more expensive it is for you, right? And when we want to switch that, we want to say, look, we want the Carousel to be really helpful in actually accomplishing the thing that you're trying to do, right?  You want students on campus, you want them to feel connected, you want them to be successful. So the more people that know what's going on and the more people that see that information, the more successful you're going to be. And I don't want you worrying about what that costs you. I want you to go, okay. I know that I want to target my freshmen, my sophomores, my juniors and my seniors with unique messages. So Carousel, we need four feeds. Cool. How many people are actually consuming that feed? Hopefully a bunch, because you'll feel like you got a lot of value out of those feeds. And so that's how we're looking at solving that classroom problem and it sets us up for some other things that we're thinking about going beyond the screens on walls. It's still necessary. I think seeing that message and a dedicated screen on a wall is absolutely important. Seeing it in the classroom is important. Seeing it on other devices and web pages and screensavers is also really important. So we're trying to think much more holistically about how we are thinking about our communication campaign and all the places that should show up So, if capital budgets and operating budgets are an issue, as they certainly would be in most school districts and the schools aren't really multipurpose these other devices like the Immersive and so on for digital signage, how do you make all this happen?  Eric Henry: Well many times. We rarely see a net new from zero signage project, right? They're making a big capital outlay for screens and for devices and so oftentimes it is, how can we take the investment you've already made? and enhance it and leverage it for new purposes. So for us, very often, we are going into a school district or we're coming alongside an LG or a Screenbeam or BrightSign or whoever that already have these deployments and saying, how can we make this deployment better? Because you're already using this device for something else. So, that's where we as Carousel come in and say, this is how we're going to price this thing. Sometimes these multipurpose devices are just playing a URL. And so if the classroom signage communication is simple. It's very easy to do if it's a little lighter weight and as Carousel, it's more about providing the thought leadership and helping them strategize what they're trying to do in their organization and think about the inventory of all the devices that you have and what are the things which we can support, what an additional investment might you need to have as well to make this happen in a big way. Then by the way, we have to make sure that it's simple enough for you to administer so that you're not hiring staff because nobody has the ability to hire staff just to manage signage networks. So that's how we think about it. Okay,  So you got to educate the educators. One thing that I've seen come out in press releases here and there, I'm thinking in particular of Rise Vision that focuses a lot on K-12 is the use of students to do the content creation and actually in some cases, manage the screen networks within schools. And when you start thinking in terms of a marketer and taking a marketer's approach to communication which makes perfect sense to me, that's not necessarily a mindset or a skill set that a 16 year old kid who knows their way around motion graphics has much experience in. Eric Henry: Yeah, I think I love that direction because it's not just for the content creator kids, it's also for the tech kids who can manage the network. And so for us, we're working on some things that will come out later this year to really encourage, close to my heart is, diversity in tech. One of the challenges with diversity in tech is that we don't have a diverse population of people to even hire to come to our company and so what I would love to do is move into the middle school, high school age of kids and encourage them to experience tech, event management of devices and configuration and those types of things. On the back end, especially in areas that are much more diverse than we are here in Minnesota and so we're looking at things that we can do as a carousel to incite much more of that activity. I applaud what Rise Vision is doing because I think it's the same heart that we have, which is how we can get these kids engaged and getting their hands on things and thinking about things early. Now, are they always going to know what to do and how to get it right? Not necessarily and so we have all the tools within the Carousel to do that in a pretty safe way where there's content approval workflows, there people don't get to post things directly to the signage network and so you'd have a teacher or an administrator checking their work and making sure they're not doing crazy stuff but I think that's absolutely important, like hands-on learning is valuable and getting kids a taste of, am I interested in communications? Do I want to create the video that goes on the signage? That's pretty cool. So, I absolutely love that direction.  Yeah. Giving logins to a group of 16 year old boys terrifies me.  Eric Henry: Yeah. You definitely have to make sure that your system is locked down and that your users are set up correctly, for sure. So when you're taking this marketing centric approach and getting material up in common areas and ideally in the classroom as well. What are those messages that really seem to work well? Beyond the obvious things like, congratulations to the team for winning the local football championship or its hamburger Friday. .  Eric Henry: Yeah, those are certainly the core things. I would say that student wellness has been a pretty significant area of focus.  What do you mean by that?  Eric Henry: What I mean by that is, around student wellness in the U. S. there's some discussion around social emotional learning is another term that they would use. So, student wellness being, are you experiencing anxiety? Here's how to prepare for tests here. Hey, the emergency drill is coming up in two weeks. Preparing students, especially, coming back from the pandemic and kids not being in that routine. Trying to help with all of the things that students are wrestling with, Hey, here are the support services we have as a school available to you as a student, here's how to prepare for a test. A lot of those. So when we talk about student wellness, their mental and their physical health, like really thinking about those types of things providing content. We actually interviewed some different teachers and administrators and found that they were spending a pretty significant amount of time trying to go and find that content online to put on their signage networks. And so we actually hired some people to help develop that content professionals in that space to provide to schools, whether they were a Carousel customer or not. Just say, Hey, if this is helpful to you, here's anti bullying campaigns, here are things around deep breathing or other things and this is not my area of expertise but just giving you a flavor of the types of things that what we're hearing from schools are a lot of kids were anxious, a lot of kids were struggling, a lot of kids were acting out when they came back from the pandemic. So how can we be helpful in even the messaging that they're seeing on screens? And so a lot of soft messaging I would say around, what do we want to recognize as a community? A lot of recognition stuff around, in primary grades especially. At our schools, they call them the wow awards. What are you exhibiting the values of the school? And we're going to celebrate Caleb, the first grader who showed kindness, those types of things. Reinforcing what we want our community to be about. And does an individual school have to have a champion, they have to assign whether it's a teacher or somebody in the front office staff or whoever who's going to manage this thing?  Eric Henry: Typically that works best. And this is true in education, in corporate, in retail, in healthcare, in every vertical, when we start talking about a signage network, the first assumption is we're going to have one person do all of this stuff, right? Or two people and it's going to be highly centralized and that reasonably quickly becomes not sustainable. So back to the Genesis of Carousel and understanding who we were building the product for in the late nineties has always been part of, we have to make sure of the complex as this becomes and at enterprise scale that individual people can still manage their little world. So fundamental to Carousel is how can we keep the user experience simple? If I'm a district and if I log in, I can't see other schools because I already don't know where I'm supposed to go. Architecting your signage system in a way that I log in and I only see the two or three things that are relevant to me is very important. You may have a champion at a school but you may have really targeted things like, Here's the PTA groups log in, here community educations log in for after school and they can only do certain things in certain zones and here's the administration from the principal's office and they're responsible for school wide messaging. So we encourage the school or the district to really, let's start with your initial scope and think about who's going to own it and where are you going to get the content from? And then let's go from there but understand that all the tools exist for you to really break it down. So even as we were talking about students earlier, this is how you would use the carousel in a safe way for students. And sometimes the safe way has to be for teachers too. Not because they're trying to do something malicious but because they might not know how to use a signage network. So for us, always the goal is how can we make this as simple and dynamic as possible? Some schools, the Carousel is the collector of all of the other information systems. Here's an RSS feed of the sports scores. Here's what we're getting for the lunch menus from another system and just consuming stuff from other places and putting it together in a way that is useful and is highlighting the most important things that's really valuable because now I don't have somebody constantly trying to feel like they have to maintain yet another system  In the same way that in the business world for workplace communications and so on, the last four or five years have seen an explosion in the ability to use API's to tap into real time data and general data from business systems. Does that work within school districts? Are there data sources available to you? And are they useful?  Eric Henry: Certainly. The thing that's a little bit challenging in the education space is probably the most valuable information system to tap into is the student information system. At the same time, you have to be very careful about that. It's like in healthcare, like patient information. There are pretty natural things that you would connect to in a school. The things that are interesting I think are more on the content creation side, let's take Google Slides or Canva or those types of tools that schools are already using. I think those are probably more pertinent in the education space, certainly than they are in the commercial space. They are fairly common, Hey, let's go grab the sports scores or grab a thing off our website or those types of integrations that are pretty lightweight but more than anything is probably like, can I grab my Google slides content that I made as a teacher and put it over here? So that's a little bit different. Corporate is much more, give me Power BI dashboards and hard data and those types of things.  The difficulty in schools is there's not like a Power BI and everybody uses it type thing in education and so we have to be a little more flexible in terms of, Hey, can you get it in RSS and consume it? It's hard to build APIs for everything that's out there.  Time is flying here but I wanted to quickly cover off as well the distinction between K-12 and higher ed because K-12 the students have to go and they go in their neighborhood or in their general area. But with higher ed, a lot of what's going on is about recruitment, right? Whether it's for athletes or non-athletes students. Eric Henry: Certainly. So in the higher ed space, I think one of our customers that uses Carousel pretty significantly is the University of Minnesota right here in our backyard and they have the 3M innovation lab and they're highlighting all of the innovation and the things that they're doing throughout the world. They're highlighting things like green buildings that are carbon neutral and all the stats of the building. So you'll see much more in higher ed space, I would say, much more around thought leadership and why you should come to this university, how well you're going to be supported here in certain areas. And the beautiful thing about signage is it's flexible, so you can schedule everything. So, the higher ed will schedule things that if you have a campus visit weekend or you know that you're having incoming students, prospective students coming to campus, you can really target your messaging to all of that type of stuff. Think about the possibilities of why we're an awesome university and all the resources available to you. Then when you get to regular campus life as people are coming back from break now, for example, now we can start talking about and here's all the things that we're doing right now. Hey, remember students, this is the thing that's going on Thursday night. So you see things in residence halls that are reinforcing things that are happening on campus because students usually remember the thing that's right in front of them because they have so many things going on. So, that's what it looks like in higher ed versus…  I think the wellness thing would be even more important or maybe not more important but as important as K-12 in higher ed because you've got particular first year students who maybe moved away from home and this is the first time on their own and they may be extroverts who are just right in there for party central but there'd be all kinds of young students who are a little a bit terrified and very lonely. Eric Henry: Certainly. And it's interesting because the services available in a higher ed are a little bit different than in K-12, right? So the messaging around wellness and availability of those services looks a little different in higher ed but you're certainly right on point. Again, reminding the students that there is actually a wellness center. There actually are places to go to work out. There are places to go to get counseling services within higher levels that you can sign up for. The university my kids attend, that's actually a free service on campus for them and they didn't know about it until they saw it. They were reminded of it and they didn't read the newsletter that the university sends out but they saw it seven times on the signage and then they actually went. So that's the idea. It worked. All things are possible. Eric, thank you very much. That was great. We could have easily chatted for another 90 minutes, but try to cap these things at about half an hour and it's been terrific.  Eric Henry: Yeah. I appreciate the opportunity. It was great chatting with you.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Interactive floor projections and video walls have been around for well more than a decade now, but  there hasn't really been widespread adoption for a bunch of reasons - like cost, complication and the simple reality that a lot of what's been shown to date hasn't had much of a point. A Canadian company, Lumo Interactive, is in a nice position to change all of that. The hardware is simple, the software is affordable and scalable, and the solution comes with some 300 templated content apps that help users tune the visual experience to the needs of the venue and audience. Instead of visual eye candy, these apps are  things like fun, engaging games. The straightforward pitch for the product, LUMOplay, is that the software can make any digital display interactive. The top-end for the software side of the solution is $74 US a month, so it is very affordable. And the developers have put years of work into ensuring the set-ups are hyper-stable and can be managed remotely. We've all walked through flagship retail spaces and seen one-off experiential set-ups that were hung up or sitting unused because they were more about short term bling than ongoing usage. The other interesting aspect of LUMOplay is that the main intended use-case is classrooms, with these interactive pieces used as a way to engage kids in schools, particularly kids who have sensory issues, autism or ADHD. I had a great chat right before Christmas with Founder and CEO Meghan Athavale. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Meghan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what LUMO does, and is LUMOplay the product and LUMO Interactive the company?  Meghan Athavale: Yes, LUMO Interactive is the company, LUMOplay is the product, and what we do is we make it easy to scale large-scale interactive digital experiences. These are experiences on digital displays that react either through motion, touch, or gesture. Okay, this would be everything from something on a video wall to something on the floor, and a lot of digital signage people, if they've been around this space for a good long time, they may recall through the years seeing “activations” where there's a floor projection. I remember there was a company called Reactrix back in the mid-2000s that was doing this sort of thing. So it's like that, but I'm sure a lot more advanced and different, just because of the years and technology.  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, it's pretty much exactly like that; where it comes from the days of Reactrix and the early days of companies like GestureTek and Eyeclick is that we've moved more towards a software-only platform.  When this technology first hit the scene, you needed to have special hardware. You couldn't just go down to Best Buy and buy a 3D camera. Now that the hardware is more ubiquitous and more affordable, it's possible to have a hardware-agnostic, software-only solution, and that's what we are. So this kind of, to borrow a phrase, democratizes this whole thing in that in the old days, it would have been incredibly expensive and complicated to do, and now it's not, right?  Meghan Athavale: That's right, yeah. I think we also just have multiple decades of information about what people are using this technology for so we're able to templatize a lot of the experiences so that companies don't need to have development teams in order to make some of these simpler interactions, they can just do an asset swap.  It's the natural progression of a lot of these things where websites used to be hand-coded and then we went into WYSIWYG and then we went into systems like Wix and Squarespace. We're like the Wix or Squarespace of interactive digital displays. So if I want to do an interactive digital display, it's like me using WordPress and buying a theme?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, to a certain extent, exactly.  So you guys have done all the heavy lifting, so to speak, in terms of the backend coding, how everything maps, but also, I think I saw there were something like 200 different apps in a library?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah. There are 300 pre-made experiences, which they're constantly turning over. So we have some in there that have been there for 10 years that we will replace with something new. We're constantly rolling over those apps, and we take requests from our community, and that's one of the things that our business model gives us the freedom to do because we're not reliant on selling hardware and our community is very vast. We represent everything from education to large brands. Our community can make requests for new apps and we'll just make them and add them to our market. So we don't have the restrictions of having to charge through the nose for custom content development because we've developed these systems that make it very easy to pump out new content, and then the other thing that we offer as far as content goes, like out of the box content is we have an SDK for the companies that do have in house developers, and then we've got a number of different templates. So you can just say, I want to make a Koi Pond, and I want to throw my business's logo behind it, and you could whip something like that off in five minutes.  So are the templates purely done in-house or do you have third-party designers who are contributing? Meghan Athavale: That's a great question. At this point, they're all done in-house. We are working towards outsourcing a lot of our content development just because it'll give us a wider breadth of content and make that content more available. We're just at the very beginning of seeing rollouts that are large enough to make joining a third-party content development team attractive.  We see this in gaming consoles all the time, where you'll have a new fantastic console that comes out, it's low cost, and they're trying to get game developers to create games for that console, but unless thousands and thousands of people have that console and are buying games for it, it's not really worth making a game for it so we're at the stage where we're starting to see enough of a widespread and permanent deployment of systems running on our platform that it makes sense to have those conversations with third-party development teams now and we're starting to have those conversations. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about scale because one of the particularly compelling things about your company and your offer is cost, in terms of, it's not very expensive at all to use this.  Can you walk through that and not really how the financials work, you're not charging a lot per instance of this on a monthly basis, so you need to have a lot of them out there, right?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, that's right. We still make a percentage of our revenue on five or six big custom projects a year. I would say that our MRR represents about half of our revenue. The goal is to reach a point in scale where we can just focus on the platform, but I do get asked pretty frequently why it costs so little.  There are a couple of reasons for it. The biggest one, I think, is just we want to make this, as you mentioned, democratizing the technology, we want to make this technology available and affordable to schools, that's our primary business goal. I and my business partner, our moms were both special needs teachers, we've seen firsthand the struggles that teachers and educators have in getting technology into their classrooms they need it for kids with sensory issues or children with autism or ADHD, and we've seen how effective interactive digital displays can be in those environments, particularly for things like increasing social skills. A lot of these kids come in, and they're really stuck on screens. They're very stuck on virtual experiences, and so it becomes a bridge, where they can engage with one another and with their teachers socially while still having that digital feedback. It's just very important to us that our pricing reflects our values as a company and that's one of our core values is making this accessible for education, but the other is that we really don't need to charge a lot for what we want to do. So at this point, our company's main work on the platform is around supporting hardware. So, as new devices come out, we're adding support for them so that you can download our software and you can plug in any of the commercially available 3D cameras, and it'll automatically recognize and calibrate that camera for you and take out the computer vision steps and specific requirements for each individual device, like DirectX. I think that would probably be the closest analog, you want something that you can plug and play regardless of which device you're using to achieve the tracking. So we want to focus on that.  We also want to focus on the tools that allow people to scale these projects to multiple locations. If you have an interactive display in a flagship store and you want us to put it into all of your stores, the step from running your proof of concept to scaling it to a hundred locations is very simple using our platform, and it's because we're constantly pushing updates and we do health management, we have a content management system, and those are the things that we want to focus on the long term. We don't necessarily want to focus on developing the individual games. We want to make the game development stuff as easy for other people to do as possible because we don't have all the ideas in the world, but we are really good at making sure that other people's ideas continue to run and don't go down.  Just so people understand, your top end cost is, if you work it out on a monthly basis, it's $74 a month, right?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, that's as high as it gets.  If I'm an agency and I decide I have a beauty brand client that wants some sort of activation that's an interactive floor or wall or whatever, that's going to cost like five-six figures probably, right? Meghan Athavale: Yeah, I mean, the part that determines the cost of any of these installations is the hardware you choose to use. If you're a brand and you're developing the content from scratch, maybe hiring our team or hiring a third party to develop custom content for you, there may be 3D modeling involved, there may be compositing, you might have multi-level programming, you might have second screen experiences, so all of those things add up.  But we can generally, when somebody comes to us and asks for a ballpark estimate, the only thing we really need to understand is where it is going and what kind of display you are planning to use, and we can generally come up with a range.  But if you're doing it, it's going to be a fraction of what it would cost if you just went to an interactive agency and said, “Build this, please!”  Meghan Athavale: Absolutely. But I think that something to keep in mind is that if you're going to an interactive agency and you don't have an idea yet, you're likely going to pay less. If you go to an agency and what you're paying them to do is to figure out what the activation actually should be, we're not an agency, and so we don't position ourselves as somebody that's going to do a lot of things like research and problem-solving. But what we can do is scale that.  You're not Moment Factory. Meghan Athavale: We are not and we don't want to fill that niche because it's a different skill set and it requires the ability to experiment with things on a one-time basis.  You may develop a solution for a brand or a display for the Super Bowl or something like that, where you're using a specific set of hardware just one time, and that's fantastic. I love that there are agencies in the world that get to do that, but that's not what we do. We look at it and go, how do we make this happen a thousand times, and that's a very different way of looking at things. So I think, if you want something that already exists, and you just want to put your stamp on it and create something that gives it a unique feel for your brand or experience, that's where you come to us. If you want something that's never been done before in the entire world and uses new technology that hasn't been proven long-term in the industry. TeamLab, and Moment Factory, are where you would go, but it is a lot more expensive for sure. You're starting to use things like LiDAR and everything else. Meghan Athavale: Yeah. The risk is just so much higher, and you need people on the ground. You need to roll a truck if something goes wrong. However, with our systems, we're way past that point.  Yeah, because you've got the device management designed for scale and everything else, right? Meghan Athavale: Yeah, we don't release anything into the market that hasn't been tested thoroughly in our labs for months and months at a time. We have the ability to guarantee things, whereas in some of these riskier projects, as long as you hire somebody that knows what they're doing, they're going to find a way to make it work, but they're not necessarily going to be able to tell you how from the beginning of the project.  So, for something like a classroom, what's the kit of parts, and what's the degree of complexity to put this in?  Meghan Athavale: Most classrooms either have an interactive floor, an interactive wall, or both.  Already?  Meghan Athavale: No, that's what they're putting in, and it's basically the same technology for either. We designed our software so it works with any projector, and a lot of classrooms already have projectors, so they'll just use what they have. So you've got your display, which in classrooms is typically a projector, a 3D camera, and a Windows computer. We typically recommend that people use the sort of baseline specification on our site as an i5 or equivalent with a decent graphics card, you don't want something that's not going to be able to run games because that's basically what we're running, and the cost is usually like for including the projector for a classroom is usually around $2,000-2,500. To set that up, is it the sort of thing that the school district or the schools, IT person, or people have to do, or is it simplistic to the level that if a teacher already got a projector pointed at a whiteboard of some kind, they can just do it themselves? Meghan Athavale: So teachers can do it themselves, and we often help teachers do it themselves. But nowadays they're busy. Teaching is not an easy career right now, and we're typically dealing with the IT personnel for an entire division when these installations are going in. If you're dealing with a full division or district, are they rolling out like that, or is it still onesie twosies?  Meghan Athavale: It's usually one per school across an entire district, is what we're seeing, and that's mostly in the U.S. We haven't really seen nearly the same traction in schools in Canada yet. I didn't say at the outset, but you're in Montreal.  Meghan Athavale: Yes, that's right. Why do you think that is just because of the way education works in Canada versus the US?  Meghan Athavale: I'm not entirely sure. I know that it's like that in all of our verticals. So it's not just education. I would say retail, events, and all of the verticals that we serve, we have faster pickup and larger rollouts in the US. It could be the population just much bigger.  I think we're just not risk takers, and I also think, to a certain extent, we're limited by things like weather and the accessibility of venues to having these types of, there are a lot more venues in the US that have built-in walls or built-in interactive components that we can just hop our software onto them. I don't think there are as many opportunities here.  You mentioned, in detail, education; what other vertical markets or segments are you seeing a lot of activity in?  Meghan Athavale: Events is the fastest growing segment, and this is like events of all different sizes and lengths, so it could be something that is like a week-long trade show, it could be like a birthday party for kids. It could be somebody who is a DJ, and they're bringing an interactive floor to all of their gigs.  It's really all over the map. We just did a pop-up in Times Square for a major chocolate brand. We've done interactives for movie launches, so like those short-term events where they're developing their own special content and it's on for less than a month, I would say that is our fastest growing vertical.  Interesting. We talked a little bit about planning before we turned on the recording, and I'm curious about how these things get planned out and how you ensure and how your users ensure that what they're putting up gets beyond just being eye candy/wow factor stuff because I often say that wow factor has a short shelf life.  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, and I absolutely agree with you. I think there has to be a balance between the cost and the reward of experiences like this. One of the biggest mistakes that we see people making is they'll see something on the internet, they'll see something in video format, and they'll think, I need that at my event, or I need that in my museum, and they'll skip the part of like why they need it. It'll be entirely like an emotional decision, and the challenge here is that there are so many more and more faked every single day. We get sent videos all the time with people asking us to do anamorphic illusions. People will see videos of that, and they'll be like, “I want that but interactive, can you make it?” And because they're seeing a video and the video is staged, and in some cases, the video is a complete composite. It's not even something that actually happened in the real world, they won't understand that it doesn't work from anything except for one very particular perspective. So, the person who's interacting with anamorphic content is not going to see what the person watching from across the street on a particular street corner is going to see, and the same thing with large-scale digital displays.  People will see these huge LED walls, and I think you saw this at our booth at LDI. When you walk right up to a big LED wall, you see the individual pixels, not the same image that somebody is watching from far away, so I think that those limitations are very difficult for people to understand and appreciate unless they've actually seen the installation in person. So I would say if you see something and you're planning to put it in an event, you're planning to use it in brand activation, go see that experience in person first. Don't make a decision about whether or not you need it until you've actually personally experienced it because seeing it on a video is not the same thing as what it's going to look like in real life. And then the other advice that I give to people when they come to me with the wow factor criteria is like, what do you want the takeaway to be? Is this a shareable thing? Do you want a hundred people to come to your event to put up a hundred different videos and tag you in them? What is your metric for success? Because if that's it, then the content's going to be very different than if you want a hundred people to enter their emails in order to play a game or you need to know at the end of the day what you're walking away from after you've put that activation in place.  I've seen different iterations of this stuff. The applications in classrooms, I think, is fantastic and it plays to kids at their whims and everything else; they want to be involved. I find it's quite different.  A lot of the ones that I've seen in public spaces like shopping malls and so on, where you see the kids running around doing stuff, interacting with it, but you don't really see the adults, and that's fine if it's aimed at kids. But I wonder sometimes, when brands do these things, that the only real interest is with children and adults saying, “I'm not doing that, I'm not an extrovert. I don't want to do this trickery in front of other people.”  Meghan Athavale: Yeah. I think that's a very fair point. One of the things that we noticed when we first started putting particularly interactive floors into retail spaces was that we still have an entire generation of adults, and I would count my own generation in there; we've been trained not to step on screens like it's your impulse isn't to go running through the light. The generations who are comfortable with that and who grew up with touch screens and expect everything to be interactive, I think they're in their twenties and early thirties now, so we are seeing that change quite a bit. I would say that from about 35 years down, we aren't seeing that hesitancy to interact with things, but I do think that we still have a long way to go in discovering how the content can be used.  A lot of times, it's to augment like physical experiences is how you get adults to engage think like axe-throwing. Adding really cool interactive graphics to an axe-throwing experience is something that's going to really delight an older crowd. Same thing with bowling alleys, making those interactive. So I think… So they're becoming Wii games.  Meghan Athavale: Yeah. I think a lot of the time, people think that there's a choice between virtual experiences in VR and physical experiences like you would have with a traditional family entertainment center. But what our software allows you to do is combine the two, so you have a headset-free experience that does have digital interactive components, but you're also engaging with something physical. So we do a lot of Air Hockey tables, pool tables, and things like that where you're still playing pool and using physical paddles, but there are interactive digital visual elements on top of that. That's where we're seeing unquestionable pickup by older people.  Yeah, so where there's tangible fun or some sort of activity versus so often when I've gone to trade shows, if I see some sort of an interactive video wall thing, please walk up to this thing and dance in front of it or wave your arms, and there'll be light particles and that's nice, but I don't see the business case here, and I don't think it's interesting for more than 10 seconds. Meghan Athavale: For sure, if you're in an environment where you're dancing anyway, having cool visual effects while you're dancing is like a good bonus, and I think that's how we have to think about it in terms of engaging an older audience, is you need to be augmenting something that they're doing anyways. You can't expect them to do an activity that they wouldn't normally do just because it's like eye candy. But if they're doing something anyway if they're already in a curling league and you can make their curling more fun… We're getting really Canadian here. Meghan Athavale: Right. I mean, I'm available for anyone who wants to try that. I've done soccer, I've done hockey, I haven't done curling yet. I would really like to make an interactive curling experience. But yeah, that's where you attract adults by helping make something that they want to do anyway, much cooler. Where did this come from, like why did you start this company?  Meghan Athavale: This is a very existential question. It's actually a pretty funny story. We started the company by accident. My co-founders, Keith Otto and Curtis Wachs and I, all worked at an agency together, and this was like 2010, back in the days when Instructables and a lot of those sorts of YouTube channels were just starting, and we started hanging out after work and just making stuff and it was all things that we would never get hired to make. We were designing our own touch screens. We created our own mist screen for projection. We did a lot of building projections and it was all for fun. We saw other people doing it all over the world. We thought it was really like a fun hobby. We started throwing parties to show off some of the things that we were making, and a friend of mine, Kayla Jeanson, who is an incredible videographer. She also has moved out to Montreal. This all happened back in Winnipeg, which is where my company is based.  So we're all back in Winnipeg. Kayla shows up at one of the parties. This was before Facebook, so it was an SMS-controlled wall where you were sending text messages, and it was making things happen on the wall. She took a video, and that video ended up going viral. We found out about it after the fact, and we started getting contacted by different businesses the University of Nevada, Reno reached out and said, “Hey, we'd really like to have something cool like this in our cafeteria.” and Curtis and I just looked at each other, we're like, wow, people will pay us to do this. We registered a business, and we all quit our jobs. We applied for CMF funding, and we launched as an agency designing these interactive experiences and, within the first two years, realized that the biggest challenge was once the experience was in place how do you maintain it? How do you make sure that it's going to continue running?  And that installation that we did back in, I think, in early 2011, in the cafeteria in Reno is still running, and part of it was just like starting by accident because a hobby that we were doing for fun led to some economic opportunities for us and the direction that we ended up taking was as a result of people liked what we did long enough to want to keep it running, to want to keep having us continue updating it. We've had a number of large-scale installations. There's one in Red Rock, Ontario, where they've done entire refreshes. We did our original installation for them in 2011 as well and just very recently replaced and updated a bunch of the software for them. The validation has been there, so the thing to focus on is how to make these experiences last, not how to make them cool for a week.  The company is quite small. I believe it's just like a handful of people, right?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah. That's right. There are four of us.  And that's all you need to be because you're not getting into the weeds with the hardware, and I think you sell the hardware that you have through a reseller, Simply NUC?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, we have a number of resellers, but Simply NUCis our preferred partner because they send us everything that they're selling so we can test it 24/7. So we're able to say with high confidence that anything you buy from Simply NUC is going to run long-term with our software.  I would like a bigger team. In all honesty, we had to let a few people go during the pandemic. I think one year in, we were like, okay, we're not going to be able to sustain ourselves with a larger team. So, I think we'd like to see some growth in the team within the next year or so. Because of the way that we've built our platform, we're able to outsource stuff that we can't do where we don't have enough work to bring somebody in-house for long periods of time, and there are also just amazing resources out there for outsourcing, now that didn't exist when we first started the company.  It's a small team. I don't anticipate that we'll ever be much more than 10 people. But a few more wouldn't hurt. Meghan Athavale: Yeah, a few more wouldn't hurt. I'd like to build in a little bit more redundancy, and I'm getting older, and one of these days, I'm hoping that there will be some sort of a succession. Because of the relationship that we have with our resellers and our installers, there's really not a lot of mission-critical stuff on our side. We push our regular updates. We create new content and respond to community requests and stuff. But not a lot of the work that we do is like on a deadline. It's a pretty chill working environment where we identify things that we think are going to be of value to the customer, and then we ask our customers, and then we build the thing. There's no pressure. And there's also a knock on wood at this point: not a ton of competition because it's still a very niche market. We don't feel the pressure to be like the trade show that you and I met on; it was the first we've been in business for 13 years, and that was the first time we've ever done a trade show exhibit. Oh, wow, and what was your takeaway from that?  Meghan Athavale: It was great. It was definitely time. We came away with quite a few new customers, and it was LDI. The reason we chose LDI as our first trade show is because there are so many companies that do events, and the total lifetime value of customers in the event space isn't as high as education would be or something where it's a permanent installation. There's just a lot more of them, and it's a lower-hanging fruit. We're hoping to bump up our revenue enough so that we can start expanding our team sometime mid-next year.  Do you have a reference case or a handful of reference cases? If people said, this sounds really cool. I can't really just walk into a classroom, obviously. Are there museums or public spaces or something like that where I could go see this?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah. There are quite a few. What we usually ask people to do is if they want to see an installation of ours in real life and they aren't able to set it up themselves, just contact us, let us know what city you're in, and we'll find somebody in your area that you can go visit. There are a lot of live public libraries and museums and buildings that are open to the public that have installations in them, and then the other thing that people can do is we have a free evaluation version of our software that you can just download and install.  So, for people who are getting into this on a commercial basis, it's a really good idea to set up a system for yourself, test it out, and play around with the tools. Don't pitch it to your customers until you've tried it, please! So we make it possible for people to just install it for free and play around with it before they make any sort of purchase before they make any representations to their customers about what it can do.  Okay. All right. So, if people want to find you online, that's LUMOplay.com, right? Meghan Athavale: Yep. That's right. LUMOplay.com, and if you reach out through the site, you will be talking to me. My name is Meghan.  All right, Meghan. Thank you very much.  Meghan Athavale: You're very welcome. Thank you, Dave.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I have written and blabbered away about how LED technology is maturing to a level that it is becoming a design consideration for architects and the people who create the look and feel of built spaces. But that thinking always assumed that clever creative could make the black surface of a big video wall, loaded with the right content, take on the look of its surroundings. Now a spin-out from a company with deep roots in LED display tech has gone the next step, by coming up with LED display tiles that look like wall finishes. Imagine a building lobby wall that, in its off state, looks like stone or tile or decorative wood, but lights up - with animations or messaging that appears out of that decorative surface. That's the pitch for a new company called CECOCECO, which is a subsidiary of Chinese LED giant Unilumin. The company was founded by Jason Lu, who years earlier founded ROE, which is widely considered top of the heap for rental LED displays used by touring acts. Lu was getting bored with that business and wanted to innovate again. So with his wife Grace Kuo, they've come up with and are now marketing something called ArtMorph. We get into a good discussion here about the origins of the product, how it works, and who is interested. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jason and Grace, thank you for joining me. First of all, can you tell me what Cecoceco is all about?  Jason Lu: I'm very happy to share the story about Cecoceco with you. I think, 16 years ago, I founded a company named ROE, and this company develops and manufactures LED displays, so we have 16 years of experience in that industry. To be honest, after 16 years, I got a little bit bored with that traditional business, and I wanted to do something different, but I didn't know what kind of product I could develop. So, one day, I found out that the traditional LED is always a black cabinet. It's difficult to put it in an indoor environment. So I hope we can do something new and put a traditional cabinet with some new masks together to 100 percent match. Grace Kuo: So the story is, one day, Jason came into a hotel and he suddenly said, “Oh, that LED looks so ugly. Why do these beautiful hotels have this ugly black LED? It's not really part of this hotel. You can really tell this is not a part of the hotel.” So he thought, why can't we build these kinds of things that have the lighting or video source but you won't see that ugly? You can take it as part of these decorations. You can make it as part of these buildings, which is how the idea came out. He thinks, oh, I should create some innovation, stuff which can make this environment look more material and beautiful and not only for the hotels, but also for restaurants, and also for libraries, every place should have those kinds of stuff, instead of the ugly black LED for atmosphere. So, for context, just so people understand, ROE is very highly regarded as the best rental temporary LED displays on the market, and your company was acquired by Unilumin, correct?  Grace Kuo: Yes.  Were you still with the company until recently? Grace Kuo: Jason's still with the company because you know the story is like he said two years earlier, when he felt bored with this traditional business, he felt oh I should stop it. I should get out of this business and continue my passion for innovation so he left for two years, but at the end of last year, he came back and continued his leadership at ROE and then he also brought back the Cecoceco  team to ROE Visual. So, right now, Cecoceco is a subsidiary company of ROE Visual as well.  So ultimately you're owned by Unilumin?  Grace Kuo: Yes.  So we'll make the assumption then that the underlying LED infrastructure technology is Unilumin?  Grace Kuo: We are very independent. We develop everything and do everything by ourselves, even the manufacturing, so they're basically only financially part of the group, but, besides that, everything is independent.  So as I'm looking at this on your website, it appears to be relatively low-res LEDs with a veneer front to them, and the veneer can be stone, it could be fabric, it could be wood, or it could be something else, correct? And how do you push the light through the veneer? Is it microscopically thin?  Grace Kuo: So this is a good question. This is a key technology we have on these products, but Jason, can I give you more explanations, about how we make lighting come through those kinds of materials? Jason Lu: Oh, yes. We tried a lot of different materials but finally we found out very special 3D printing technologies so e use these technologies to print the different masks. But it looks very real. When you touch it, you will feel this is real wood but it's still printing technologies. Oh, okay. if I see a stone wall where there's light coming through, and I'm thinking to myself, how did they cut the granite or whatever that thin, they didn't? It's 3D printed to look like stone? Grace Kuo: Yeah, there are two different ways we are doing this. One way is as Jason explained to you, but we also, actually, find out it's really, goldstone, the real stone, that can work with our products which also can have very high lighting or display transparencies.  Oh, so you can do it with real stone?  Grace Kuo: Yeah, we can do it with real stone.  Jason Lu: But the basic version is a print version.  Grace Kuo: Yeah, so we have two versions. One is, the printing version, in which you can choose everything you want, you can choose wooden, you can choose stone or you can choose a different kind of texture, but we also have the real materials that can work with our products. So we're working with one of the companies in the US, which is making a very special stone. They have very high lighting transparencies, which can work with our products very well.  Jason Lu: But we start from the printing direction first because this is an easy way. But if some customer needs customizing, we will choose some real material, but I think we start from the basic printing idea.  So you have a number of different faces or veneers or whatever that you already have available. But if you had an existing building and a lobby that was wood lined, you could color and tone match whatever the look of that would to create a custom veneer, right? Grace Kuo: Yes, that's possible to customize.  Interesting. So, how bright is it?  Jason Lu: It's 700 nits, which is more than bright enough for what you're trying to do, right?  Grace Kuo: Yeah, I think so. We also discussed this with a lot of scientists and designers, and they felt 700 nits, for those kinds of motion products is more than enough.  Yeah, I have seen some instances of low-res LED walls where they put a diffusion fabric layer in front of it to create something visually interesting without going to the full expense and everything associated with a full video wall to fill a whole lobby. This created the experience without all that cost and all the maintenance and everything. Is that kind of what you're going for?  Grace Kuo: No, actually we are approaching different way to achieve this goal because, yes, you can see there are several projects that already happened, with different materials on top of the traditional screen, but there are a lot of works on a project site, so you always get two layers, separately and you need to have a lot of completed works on the project side.  So it's gonna cause a lot of unpredictable problems and also cost a lot in labor, so our goal is to integrate these two ideas together and make one a finished product when the customer gets it, they get finished products and just make the quick install. They don't have actual onset costs.  Okay, and there's a whole mounting system that you apply to the wall, fairly shallow by the looks of it, and it looks like the tiles themselves are less than an inch, and each of the tiles is ten by ten, I think, right?  Grace Kuo: Each tile is 500 millimeters by 500 millimeters.  So these things go together like a traditional LED video wall and you can stack them, tile them, and so on?  Grace Kuo: Yeah, so you can build them as big as you want.  And there's no physical dimensional limit? Grace Kuo: There is no physical dimension limit so it's just units you can combine together.  Jason Lu: And we also did some optic design to try and reduce the gap between the two modules. To reduce the gap between the modules?  Grace Kuo: With those kind of upper masks, visually, you've got some optical visible lines. So we also use some technologies to reduce these optical visible lines to make people feel this is really one picture, there are no optical lines, between units. Right, because you want to make it disappear and just feel like the wall, the furnishings of the building. what typically is going to show on these... Is it immersive, it's ambient, you're not really doing messaging or anything, correct?  Grace Kuo: What do you mean by messaging?  You wouldn't run text. You wouldn't run a logo or something like that, probably? Grace Kuo: It's possible, because the resolution is more than enough to play the characters or any content.  So you could read something, or would it be more of a large logo or something?  Grace Kuo: No, you can read some things.  If you were describing the pixel pitch, what would it be? Grace Kuo: Objective. Grace Kuo: Because we are not selling this as an LED display, we are selling this whole concept as a totally new experience that we are bringing to this market, so it's based on the display technologies, but it's not a display, it's totally a mode product, emotional products, bring the different lighting or visual experience, to the people so that's why we're not selling on the resolution.  So the people who you'd be accustomed to selling to and partnering with at ROE are the very different people for this product because I suspect you're dealing with architects and designers of internal spaces.  Grace Kuo: You are correct. So it's currently totally different customers from what we have right now. So that's why we said that Cecoceco was independent from the design to the sales.  So when you go to these architects and interior designers, are they tilting their head to the side trying to figure out what you're talking about, or do they get it? Grace Kuo: Most designers or architects, when they hear these stories, they get it, so they know what we want to bring to this market. They know they see some things actually they've been looking for a long time because they are also really boring. With the LED screens, there are only high resolutions, but nothing new. So they feel there is something that can really be a game changer.  What you've done here is the advancement of the idea that was in the Comcast Tower in Philadelphia some 15 years ago where you had, I think was P6 pixel pitch LED, with the content picking up the look of the side wood walls in the lobby but then stuff would appear on it. But as you were saying at the start, if it was off, it was black.  And in order for it to always look like the rest of the lobby, it always had to be on versus what you're describing where it could be off, and it's going to look like the rest of the lobby.  Grace Kuo: So it's just part of the decoration. So that is where the idea comes from, you need to have fun things be part of these decorations, be part of this environment, because we don't want to bring some high technologies and destroy the history in castles or even history is a restaurant, right? But we still want to bring these modes, bring these emotions to the people living there or sitting there. We wanted that when the people came to step into this space, they didn't feel, “Oh, there is some, some lighting or a display surrounding them.” But they felt, when they are lighting up, they say, “Oh, I'm in a beautiful, lighting environment.”  So, do you consider this more an architectural lighting application than a digital display app application?  Grace Kuo: So this is a combination because we have a full 16-17 years of knowledge about the lighting and lighting source or display source. We keep some balance between the lighting and displays and make sure, even with a display, they still can get the true lighting source out. So that's why we do not use our traditional three RGB colors. We use multiple color combinations.  So it's not just white light?  Grace Kuo: No, not just white light. It's four colors, but it is not a traditional full RGB color. We draw multiple colors together to get more mature and to lighten up. Jason Lu: So we use four-color LED. So that means the light quality is very high. So, the CII is very high. Interesting. So when you said that architects and designers have been looking for this for some time and unable to find anything, why were they looking for this?  Grace Kuo: I think because they want to offer something new to the end user, right? And I think they also have the same feelings as us just because the people like the video and the lighting, right? So that's why we can see LED displays everywhere right now, but to be honest, in some places, it's not the right place to put out the display. How many people are really reading the message from the display when they get in the galleries, they are going to galleries, they are enjoying the content, they enjoy the atmosphere. They're not really reading the message from the LED, right?  So if you can offer that kind of architecture stuff that can also bring this lighting or display experience, it's a bonus for the market. On the creative side, you're selling to architects and interior designers who are used to specifying finishes, like this wall is going to be mahogany or granite or whatever. They don't typically have to worry about creative files motion graphics, and so on. How do you deal with that?  Grace Kuo: So we have our own developed controllers, which you can design any content you want to play out. So you would design the content within your software?  Grace Kuo: Yeah, we actually have some content galleries already set up, controllers, which you can choose directly, but you also can create your own, content with shaders, and play the different content.  Is it a particular skill set to produce creative for this, or if you know your way around motion graphics, you'll be fine? Grace Kuo: You probably need a little bit of technical background, but it's not that difficult.  But if you work in After Effects or something like that, you'd be able to figure this out.  Grace Kuo: Yes. What about the cost versus conventional LEDs? So if I wanted to put something in a lobby and I was thinking about, let's say, a 1.9-millimeter pixel pitch Unilumin LED wall or something versus the Cecoceco, is it similar cost, a lot less, or more?  Grace Kuo: Oh, compared with the 1.9 millimeters, of course, it's going to be lower than that resolution, so our target MSRP price is around $4,500 per square meter, which is quite acceptable after we talk with the market, especially for the buildings. At the very beginning of the design, they already can design these products be part of the creation materials. Basically, they can see me on some of the creation materials from the beginning. So that's when this is probably the easiest to sell into a building, right? When they're putting the building up, and it's just another number in a whole bunch of numbers versus coming at them cold and on a finished building and saying, “It's going to be X to put this in too.”  Grace Kuo: Yeah, so you can do it before they have to finish these buildings, but you also can do this after that, but if you make a better plan at the beginning, which means you can also see the materials, right? For the majority of the walls, you don't need marble anymore. You just put our ArtMorph instead of the regular marble.  Is it changeable? Let's say there's a building that starts off with your product that has a wood-like veneer on it and they do a renovation quicker than they'd expected and want to go to stone or something. Could they retrofit it? Grace Kuo: Yes, this is a key point. This is another benefit of ArtMorph. The surface is actually changeable, especially, for houses, like hospitality, they would like to show different content, and different feelings, to their guests in different holiday seasons. So the textures are actually changeable, and it's very easy to change.  Is it the module that changed, or can you actually change the veneer?  Grace Kuo: So you can actually just change the top part.  So when did you get started, and when did you start selling?  Grace Kuo: So we are ready to sell. Actually, we already started to sell but officially, I think we're going to start selling Q1 next year, 2024.  And are you showing up at trade shows with it?  Grace Kuo: Yes. We're going to bring this to the ISE in Barcelona in 2024.  I'll be there.  Grace Kuo: Oh, good. looking forward to seeing you there. So, are you going to have your own stand, or will you be associated with ROE and Unilumin? Grace Kuo: Cecoceco is going to share a stand with ROE, but they're going to have their very independent, separate area.  And are you installed anywhere yet and can you say where it's at?  Grace Kuo: We are, but we can not yet say.  But you're actually selling and installing? Grace Kuo: Yes.  Where are you seeing the most interest? Is it North America, Dubai, or China?  Grace Kuo: I think North America, of course, is a very important market for us because there are a lot of interior designers and some architecture, and Dubai, we haven't done too much because we want to focus on a strong market and expand to other territories. So we are going to start from North America and the UK. We feel these two markets have a lot of talented designers.  I would have thought you'd start in China.  Grace Kuo: China wants to get this kind of influence from overseas.  So where is the company based? Grace Kuo: The company is based in Shenzhen, China.  Do you have offices in North America? Grace Kuo: We have an office in North America, which is in Chatsworth, Los Angeles.  Suburban LA. Perfect. All right, this was great. I'm looking forward to seeing this in Barcelona.  Grace Kuo: I'm looking forward to seeing you in Barcelona. All right. I appreciate your time with us. Thank you. Grace Kuo: Thank you, Dave.  Thank you, Jason.  Jason Lu: Thank you, Dave. I'm so sorry, I cannot explain my idea to you directly, but Grace is a very good partner of mine. Grace Kuo: We are partners, yes. but Jason can give you more product introductions in Barcelona. That would be perfect. I suspect there's going to be a lot of people very interested in this.  Grace Kuo: I think so, yeah. 

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When cannabis started being legalized in US states like Colorado, and more recently across Canada, it struck me that it was a very interesting new vertical for digital signage companies to chase - because it was a greenfields industry that had retail environments offering up products wholly unfamiliar to a lot of the people walking in the door. It's grown pretty clear, though, that while there may indeed be big long-term opportunity, cannabis retailing is also a very complicated industry - with rules and regulations changing by jurisdiction, a whole bunch of vendors and SKUs, and widely variable supply chains. While there might be a common perception that getting the OK to sell cannabis is a license to print money, a lot of operators are struggling financially, and both retailers and the tech ecosystem underpinning cannabis are coming in and dropping out all the time. A Canadian company called BudSense has a particularly interesting story to tell. The company, based in Regina, Saskatchewan, started out as a retailer, but found its way into technology to fill the gaps in what they needed to effectively manage stores and communicate to customers. Now, software is the main business, and BudSense has a SaaS software product that is all about managing menus and other screens around dispensaries, and is very specifically tuned to cannabis retailing - as opposed to general digital signage software that could also drive cannabis store menus. Canada has been the main focus to date, but co-founder David Thomas says BudSense has business in the US, and plans to grow that. David, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me a little bit about BudSense? David Thomas: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Dave. BudSense is a menu merchandising company in the cannabis industry. It solves the problem for our retailers of menu management. And are you focused just on menus or are you doing in-store promotion, all kinds of other things within these dispensaries?  David Thomas: Yeah, we do some in-store promotion tool sets as well, pretty much anything that involves merchandising is the solution that we want to solve.  Your company's in Saskatchewan, right? David Thomas: Yes, we're based out of Regina, Saskatchewan, where we got our start in dispensary operation.  So when you say dispensary operations, you mean you're actually running a dispensary?  David Thomas: We were, and we still are. I partnered with my brother, John, around legalization in Canada. We started by running four stores in Saskatchewan. We've since sold those stores and moved on to other retail footprints but that's when we started developing the software that is now BudSense.  What set you down that path? Because being a retailer is very different from being a software company? David Thomas: Absolutely. So I have a background in engineering. My brother has a background in pharmacy. We actually started our business partnership before cannabis in real estate and we have an entrepreneurial spirit. We were always looking for opportunities and when cannabis was announced for legalization, we saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and we wanted to participate so that was the catalyst that pushed us into the cannabis space. We went into retail because of our real estate and pharmacy background. I have a lot of experience running teams and building systems. So we just put our skill set to use in a brand new industry.  So did you write your own software to run your store and that's what got you down the path or was it the absence of good software to do what you needed?  David Thomas: It was both. We solved whatever problem was directly in front of us. So it wasn't like we wanted to solve digital menus. It was more of a necessity and then we had the skillset to do it in that way. So when we started, we had four stores to run and that's very atypical from a normal business where you start with one and then progress if you're successful. So from day one, I knew that we needed a system to manage merchandising from a central location. So we could know what was happening in the stores and there were some solutions on the market but they were pretty flimsy at that point and we just felt more comfortable building our own. So, that's where we started down the path of digital menus. At what point did you decide that you'd rather be a tech company than a retailer?  I think the perception when cannabis was legalized in Canada was if you managed to get permits, particularly in those provinces where they allowed for private operators, it was a license to print money. David Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. The markets are very interesting with cannabis. I've watched them develop in our region, in the U.S., and other places and that's certainly the perception from the outside looking in and that happens a lot in an early market, whereas some of the permits are protected and ours were in the early days. We actually sold what turned out to be the peak of the market which was an excellent catalyst for our next chapters. So now a lot of the markets in Canada are oversaturated. I've heard numbers thrown around something like 70% of dispensaries in Canada are unprofitable and that has to do with market saturation, but it also has to do with operations being a little bit bloated and not really having the efficiency needed.  BudSense is focused on driving some extra revenue but also tries to make sure your costs are under control and you're running an efficient operation. I've also heard a number of times that the big challenge of a lot of the people who get into launching dispensaries is they know they're cannabis, but they don't really know retailing.  David Thomas: You've hit on something really interesting because even if they do know retail, which is very rare, cannabis is different. So you have this situation where no one has the perfect skillset so it's going to take innovation and learning regardless of what your background is because it's new and it has new problems.  So what happens is, regardless of your background, you go into it, you start trying things and if you're not mindful then your first go at it isn't going to be perfect. You're going to need to change your strategy. That's where people get into trouble with switching costs, with building systems that aren't necessarily malleable enough to change. So there's a ton of different backgrounds. Some people are more experienced with the product. Some people are more experienced with retail. Some people are more experienced with purchasing. It's really interesting because you essentially have to lean on your strengths while understanding your weaknesses and kind of build the business that way. There are a lot of different paths to success in cannabis and we see that with our different customers of BudSense where there's not one way to do this but it is challenging regardless of what your background is.  One of the big challenges that I've perceived is how things are licensed and regulated changes by jurisdiction. So for instance, In Saskatchewan, where your company is based, it sounds like it's privatized. Where I live in Nova Scotia, it's run by the Provincial Liquor Corporation. So it's very much regulated and I can go in and buy a bottle of wine around the corner and buy whatever you buy there, I don't terribly know but it's all incorporated and much more heavily regulated perhaps than in a private situation and I guess it's the same in the states where it can change state by state.  David Thomas: Yeah, you've hit on another one where it's interesting because your operation depends on the municipality (based on zoning) and the region you're in because one of the most important parts of it is your location and how protected it is from other competition, and then your purchasing is different based on your region. But one thing that we excelled at is it's very simple. We read the rules, and we read the regulations, and we understood them. And a lot of other times people would go in based on what they're doing in the U.S. or what they're doing in another market.  The problem with that, like a concrete example, was when we opened our stores in Saskatchewan, we didn't have a security guard at the front door because the regulations didn't say you had to, we were treating our customers as customers and a lot of people looked at what the U.S. was doing and they saw these security guards at the front door and they didn't necessarily understand the purpose of the security. The security guards were there because it's not legal federally. So it's purely a cash business and the insurance is extremely expensive. So when you have a cash business, your store is filled with cash, and it's a target for crime. So for those reasons and the illegality of it at a federal level, that's why the security guard is there. But when you read the regulations, there's no reason for one. So it's little things like that where if you're not focused on the details of the regulations and respect the regulations, it's really hard to create a dynamic business without understanding them.  So if I'm a cannabis dispensary and I've just opened up, or I'm about to open up, and I determine I need digital menu displays and I would like some promotional displays as well, could I just use any old digital signage CMS software to run the store or would I be just buying into a whole bunch of work that I don't need to?  David Thomas: It depends how large your organization is and it depends how highly you value your menus. If it goes back to our conversation earlier, what is your skill set what do you value and how are you going to create value in your business? If you're willing to enter all of your product information daily and keep it up to date on your menu, which some people do, there is a viable reason to do that if you want expanded information that says something BudSense doesn't offer. If you want a clean, tight operation, that runs your menus a little bit more efficiently and automated, that's where BudSense really starts to shine. BudSense manages scale really well. So you may be able to have an owner-operated store that uses a chalkboard that understands every product that's coming in, but when you get 5-30 stores under a banner that falls apart really fast. It again depends, but like we offer some powerful menu solutions that go beyond that kind of out-of-the-box, digital signage stuff that you're referring to. And from what I understand, there's a whole sort of technology ecosystem focused around the cannabis dispensary business, including point of sale systems, information systems, inventory management systems, all that stuff that maybe you would never find in an apparel store or hardware store or something like that, but it's tuned to cannabis. Is that accurate?  David Thomas: It's very accurate and I'm fascinated by it because I think it's partly to do with our time in modern technology, where if hardware stores were legalized today or if hardware stores were invented today, I believe they would have a stronger tech ecosystem. I believe that we're using tech in cannabis more so than in other verticals at the start of their run because it's available to us and it's helpful. That said, the nature of cannabis and the instability of the supply chain leads really well to these niche products. You mentioned point of sale, and for example, there's a seed-to-sale regulation needed where you're monitoring individual products from the time that they're grown to packaged, delivered to the store, accepted at the store, to sell to the customer, meaning seed to sale and that regulation is over and above most just out of the box point of sale systems, so that's why.  And that, again is down to the region. So these point-of-sale companies have to change their technology to support region-by-region regulations based on that seat to sell tracking and other things. Wow. So it gets very complicated.  David Thomas: It does. It is certainly a unique set of challenges, and it's a really early stage too. So a lot of these challenges and underdeveloped technology fall on the lap of operators, and it's challenging.  As a tech provider in this ecosystem, is it challenging to get to scale because you've got all of these operators and as you said, 70 percent of them maybe aren't profitable, so they come in, they come out, they're cash constrained, and everything else?  David Thomas: It is challenging.. That being said, this is my first software-as-a-service company that I've built so I'd imagine that it's always challenging, but I do think it's particularly challenging in cannabis.  That said, I think it requires the right approach for this industry, and it's back to what I was saying, where just understanding the rules and, as you said, understanding the conditions that these operators are trying to run their business in is really important. For those reasons, we spend all of our capital on the product. A lot of our competitors spend more on sales than we do. And the reason why we spend on products is because exactly what you're saying, there's a lot of problems to solve and if people are going to go to business, I don't really value early market share that much. That being said, it lowers the revenue that we can create out of the bat, but I feel like focusing on the product and focusing on trying to help our customers create success, drive revenue, and clean up their costs. I feel like that's a winning formula long term. It's just a little bit rocky at the start. And where are we in that sort of evolution of the industry? Did legalization happen 10-plus years ago in Colorado? David Thomas: Yeah, 10 years ago, Colorado. Five years ago, Canada. The Colorado legalization, like the legacy in the US, is interesting because they've been in an eye on an island. So, tools such as BudSense haven't really hit them. They made do with what they had, and it created interesting market conditions. It's all in the US, also I don't think they've seen the growth and consumption expected and that's because without federal legalization they really won't see that three decade increase of consumption that we're expecting and when you go nationally legalized like Canada would see. But yeah, where are we from a tech standpoint overall? I think we're really early. I don't think it's been proven that a point-of-sale system can have international dominance. It still seems to be region by region. I don't really think many people have realized how taxing regulation is on technology. For that reason, BudSense is what I call decoupled from the transaction, and this is counter to most traditional tech thinking where you want to get as close to the transaction as possible because that's where the money is but in cannabis, that's also where the regulation is. So, by decoupling from that, we can spray it a little thinner and build solutions that are easier to scale across the entire industry. So industry as a whole, I think we have a long way to go. BudSense is making pretty significant strides in building powerful tools that take some of these retailers out of the dark ages, of the challenging period of cannabis retail. And some of the surf riders have come in and out of the space as well or you contacted me because one of them was basically backing out of the digital signage.  David Thomas: Yeah, I've seen a lot of significant decisions of pulling out, coming back in, investing, divesting. It's tough for me to speculate, but yes, our main competitor in the US has dropped out of digital signage in the cannabis industry.  And you're speculating again, but I'm curious: why would they do that? It strikes me as if you get into something with them, then you've got recurring revenue. David Thomas: Yeah, my best assumption is, first of all, Enlightened was purchased by a company called Weedmaps, which I believe is the largest Cannabis company in the world. So they had a larger parent company, and when a larger parent company is involved, and you're dealing with a subsection of that company, who knows what could have possibly happened? But what I see time and time again is even a dominant player like Weedmaps, likely doesn't understand the whole scope of the cannabis industry. They get their part really well, but they don't necessarily understand the retail part or the cultivation part and the individual challenges that come with it. So when they think of digital signage, they're probably thinking of it as simpler than what BudSense has, and when you bring a simple solution to a really complicated environment, it's really tough to maintain and scale. So there's a chance that they're making the right decision for them, whereas that recurring revenue that they might have on their balance sheet, maybe it's not sustainable. And again, I don't know, but those are some assumptions that I could make to the decision.  Of those retail stores, dispensaries, whatever you want to call them in Canada and the US, are most using digital screens in some way or are some of them still analog?  David Thomas: It goes in trends. Canada has a higher digital percentage than the US. A lot of stores don't use menus at all because they just completely simplify the problem and use their Budtenders to communicate directly with the consumer.  But that gets challenging in terms of volume and staffing, right? David Thomas: So many things, because then now you have personal bias too and your consumer, they don't necessarily want to get all their information from the Budtender. Some people love it. Some people don't like it.  I think one of the missing pieces in that ideology is that the menu isn't just for the consumer. It's also for the Budtender so that they can use the menu to discuss purchasing options together. With cannabis, there's a lot of information to process, and I think that some operators, they're around it all day, every day, and they lose sight of what it's like for a consumer to come into the store and just absorb and consume all of this information. And what menus really do is help structure those conversations, regardless of how you see the customer journey happening, I think you're missing out if you don't have a well-thought-out merchandising plan. That said, if you're dealing with something that's inefficient and doesn't really work that well and it requires more headache than it's worth, there's a great argument to not do it at all.  If you're not able to do it well, don't do it at all. That is a methodology that I subscribe to for other parts of the business. So why not menu management?  Yeah, that's a long-running story in digital signage. A lot of venue operators, whether they're retailers or QSR or whatever, invest in the technology. They invest in the original content load, and then it just becomes an orphaned bunch of screens that never get updated.  David Thomas: Yeah, I see that all the time, and then it's just in the background, right? We see that in our sales cycle too, where our potential customers are using another solution, it might just be collecting dust in the background but when they see our software, they're more like, oh, this exists. This is out there to help me manage my menus and make it a little bit more meaningful. So it's fascinating. There is a difference in ways that operators manage menus, whether you're talking about ‘No menus at all' or poorly managed menus or something more along the lines of BudSense.  Yeah. I was excited by the prospect of digital signage in cannabis retailing because you would have a whole wash of consumers who would be walking into these stores for the first time, completely unfamiliar with the product, and maybe a little bit uncomfortable because they don't get it. They don't know what they're buying. They don't want to be sold stuff that's overpriced or whatever.  I saw digital signage as a way to help educate, drive awareness, and streamline operations. But I hear a variety of stories, including from you about how well that works.  David Thomas: Yes, it's fascinating, right? I think back to legalization and what consumers' expectations were of the store and what we had. They came into our store on day one, and we had 8 products for them to buy, like edibles weren't legal, we didn't have pre-rolls because they weren't legal and it was just in a lot of ways disappointing. And when you look at it up close, it feels like a struggle. But when you resume the way out, I see a 30-year improvement cycle where we're getting better at this, and we're starting to pull consumption away from alcohol and towards cannabis, and I think that a lot of operators are a little bit too close to it where they don't see these new customers coming in because it might only be 2% of their customer base that is new, but that 2% over time is massive and it's exactly what you were saying where there's a feeling that our customers know how we do things, we know where to find the products that they want to buy and maybe they even already know what they want to buy before they come into the store. Yes, that's all true but there is this subsection of the consumer base that is intimidated the first time that they come into the store. There are a lot of Canadians who still haven't been into a cannabis store, or maybe they went once, and they had a negative experience. So, exactly to your point is this customer journey. We really do have to try and make it as welcoming as possible.  And I've seen everything from cannabis stores that look like Apple stores, they're sleek, they're beautiful and I've seen other ones that look like Korean variety stores in suburban Toronto or something, you just run down and shabby and everything.  David Thomas: Yeah, it's interesting. That was the common thread of, “We want to be the Apple store of cannabis,” and I think we've softened that stance a little bit. A lot of those companies who had that concept in mind, they're quite frankly, they're bankrupt now or on their way out, and what happens is when you have a 30 percent margin packaged good product, you gotta be careful where you spend your money.  So, I think it's about making our customers comfortable, and the other thing is how much space do you need? I think, as a rule, even our early stores were too big and they were still half the size of some of these other ones. If you make your store small enough, you can make it as nice or as rough around the edges as you were saying, as you want. But it's really about where you're spending that money and how you want to design your customer experience from there. So tell me about the company, what's your installed base?  David Thomas: So we have approximately 10% of the Canadian market right now. We started out focused, so we're in over 500 locations in the US and Canada. We're very focused on maximizing our current customers' use of the product; that's how we approach our development. And as we go, we build from word of mouth and inbound leads. As I said, we don't have a ton of sales efforts.  One of our early successes was based on my retail experience, understanding from first-hand experience what a retailer needs and building a product to suit that. But eventually, that kind of ran out, and I'm still involved in the space from a retail perspective, but what we started to realize was there are different perspectives of this, and there are different ways of doing it, and we look at every new customer as an opportunity to see a new perspective of how menu management can work in this space, and we try to build our product around those different stories. So each of our retailers might not realize it, but they have a voice in the development roadmap of our product, and that's how we see growth because if we can save our customers' time and then once we save them time, we can start maximizing margins, and once we maximize margins, we can start boosting their revenue. We can really take some of these companies who are struggling and make their business better, and that's what we're focused on rather than store count because we're in the infancy of the industry. So, I see it as almost a waste of resources to chase early market share. I would much rather build a strong product.  Is it easier to work in Canada than the US because it is nationally legal?  David Thomas: I guess it really depends on what your goal is. It's easier to do some things with cannabis in Canada. For instance, we built a database of 35,000 SKUs in Canada to help our retailers with data entry. That's not possible in the US. There are no barcodes from state to state, just because of the federal legality of it. That said, if you're going to do a more simple solution, the US could be easier. The reason why we focus our development on Canada is because it's a little bit more robust in terms of a national regulation standard. So we can build out our product in a way that kind of wraps around a nationally legalized structure, and then what we do is we take parts of that, and we distribute it in the US. So our Canada market is like an R&D farm, and then we pull out parts of our product and wrap it around a particular use case in the US, but if we focus on the US, it's so fragmented that it's tougher to build that cohesive system. It's better to build the cohesive system and then only use 30% of it rather than build 30% of it and not know what that 70% is supposed to look like if that makes sense.  The company is privately held?  David Thomas:  Yes. And how many people do you have?  David Thomas:  We have 12 people right now. And just dispersed, or do you actually have a bunch of people in Regina? David Thomas:  We have a head office. It's a pretty cool program. It's called the Conexus Cultivator, and it's a tech incubator. So we have about half of our team there, and then the rest is distributed throughout Canada and remote work. You're in Victoria, BC, which is a lot nicer this time of year than Regina.  David Thomas: It is, yeah. I spent many winters in Regina. I do feel grateful to be here now in the winter.  Yeah, I'm a Western Canada boy, so I had to get the hell out of that one. I don't like minus 30 Celsius.  David Thomas: I feel like I've spent enough time in it.  You've paid your dues.  David Thomas: Yes.  All right. This has been great. Very insightful.  David Thomas: Thanks a lot, Dave. I appreciate you having me on.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Dise is an acronym for Digital In Store Experience, and that nicely sums up what the Swedish software firm Dise is all about. Around for 20 years now, the company is heavily focused on a retail-centric communications platform sold through solutions providers and other partners in its channel. Now everybody and their sister identifies retail as a main target vertical solution for their platform, but most software options are designed to serve a wide variety of interests that might include everything from factories and airports to hospitals and schools. Dise says it's all about retail. I had a good chat with CEO Sebastian Kryh about what makes his company's product offer distinct, and how Dise defines retail experience. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Sebastian, thank you very much for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of your company?  Sebastian Kryh: Sure thing. Thank you for having me, Dave. So Dise (Digital in-store experience) is a Swedish company that was founded back in 2003. So we've been at it for a while. For digital signage, we like to distinguish that by saying in-store experience or digital in-store experience, right? Because it's so much more than just a digital poster it's sold purely through a network of selected partners with the goal of connecting the online and physical world to the physical space by improving the customer experience. With the mission to build a user experience to love with intuitive and easy software as a tool. So would you describe Dise as a software company or more of a solutions company that has software?  Sebastian Kryh: Interesting distinction there, I would describe it as a software company where we build on a product company. So, we build the platform or the suite, which has three parts, CMS being the shining star in the playout. We work with partners to create their experiences their offers, and opportunities to work with their brands and their customers.  Okay. So, if you say you have a suite, what else is in the suite?  Sebastian Kryh: There's the CMS. It's a cloud-based and intuitive CMS. We have a design tool to build dynamic content and templates in general, used in the CMS and then we have the software that runs on the media players. Both external ones like Windows, Linux, and Brightside and SOCs like the big ones, Samsung and LG. So when you're working with largely retail customers and you start an engagement with them. What does your company take on, and what's taken on by partners?  Sebastian Kryh: So what we do is that we only work with partners. So, from time to time, of course, we interact with the brands and do that. The perfect Dise partner is a full-service partner that takes care of all the pieces in the offering to the brands. Everything from creating the content to the consultancy of creating the concepts, installation support for all the partners. And what we supply is the in store experience platform and the support to the partners..  So, it would be a bit like, I know, I understand it's very different, but Broadside is they're UX, Their everything is all focused around digital out-of-home advertising. That's what they're there for, versus probably, the high 90s percentile of CMS software companies are general offers that have some specialty aspects to them, but they're pretty broadly focused. It sounds like you're saying that Dise is very much retail UX, designed for retail that's where you're going to shine.  Sebastian Kryh: That's where we're going to shine. Exactly, and that decision was made quite a number of years back where it wasn't more of a general feel to it. You could do basically everything you still can, but the main focus would be retail, and how we interact with the retail needs of campaign management and structuring of all the stores and the remote management you would need for that. So, we feel that we are the ones who are focusing on retail and marketing ourselves as such and that's where we shine, and that's where we have the best results.  So, you have in-store experience. How do you define experience, and how does the company define it? Because it's a very broad term and used quite a bit when I don't think there's a real experience to what is being floated.  Sebastian Kryh: Yeah, sure. But it's also our way of thinking about combining the brand of the product experience together with them. What we can add is personalized communication and interaction that could be through an improved sales conversation or creating customer engagement. From everything, getting the correct feeling and vibe in the retail space to be able to have that really pointy and specialized content or communication for any given period of time or any use case in some sense, right? So you've been doing this for 20 years. I realize you haven't been there the whole 20 years, but the company has been doing it. What has changed? Obviously, there's a lot more adoption of digital in store than there was 20 years ago, but I suspect that your target customers are also a lot more sophisticated and understanding of how to best use this. Sebastian Kryh: Exactly, and beginning in the early days and as you said, I've been in the company before, for almost four years in different roles but it started out as really tech focused and the technology and the power that could be found 20 years ago was not where it is today, of course. Reading that it took more tech savvy and innovation to make stuff happen. But we're seeing it more and more moving from really focusing on what the tech is and what the CPU power and stuff is. It's more about what you can do with it and how you utilize the power that's available. I don't know if that was an answer to your question though, but we're of course seeing it from a perspective of also seeing it being a lot of Windows install or BrightSign installs where we're seeing external media players. Now of course, we're seeing the SOC devices being much more capable and powerful and being something that's growing faster, at least for us, than the external media players, which is still a clear majority of all the installs we have but we're getting more and more requests for advanced features to be connected with triggers and sensor to screen itself. I get a sense in a lot of cases, let's say 15 years ago, if a retailer decided to incorporate digital signage into their in store experience. Quite often there were a whole bunch of screens and put on walls where there was available space. And it seems now that it's way less about the sheer idea of having a bunch of screens in a store. Maybe it's one or two screens but really thoughtfully positioned as, this screen behind the sales counter is for this reason and this one in the entry area is for this other reason and so on. So, there's a lot more strategy behind it than before. Sebastian Kryh: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. That's exactly right. If we're going back a couple of years, it'd be okay. Now the 98 inch screen was put to market and everybody wanted to use it first. It's a cool piece of tech and that's also one thing, of course, that could bring attention but it's just, what do you do with it? You might get a better experience or the message getting through more, even if it's a 55 inch, right? So we're trying to take a step back from the actual screen size for tech or led wall. This is what is the content and working through a channel strategy. It's not just, what do you want, what's the message and what do you want your end users to see and react to and how you could compile that to be having a synchronized story.  Also the old ways we've been talking about omnichannel for many years but how are we seeing? What's communicated in the digital world on websites or on social media? How do you bring that in and make it feel natural when it comes in store? So you have a connected customer journey. We're getting more and more of those and what our partners are working towards, it's more and more connected to that journey.  That's correct. So if I was to ask you, give me a good example of a company that you and your partners are working with, where they're really doing a nice job of applying digital in their stores, without putting you on a spot with the retail and making sure they're ones that you're allowed to talk about. Sebastian Kryh: Yeah. So what are you saying that you want a partner we're working with or what was your question? Are there things that are done in retail settings that are always reliably impactful and other ones that have been tried? And I'm thinking about some interactive things I see that are more like Novelty than actually having an impact. I'm curious what works and what doesn't. I guess it is a shorter way of saying it.  Sebastian Kryh: Help me understand what you're meaning.  I have seen some interactive screens put into retail environments, particularly athletic retailing sporting goods stores, where I don't know why they did that other than the simple fact that, Hey, it's an interactive, you can boycott this screen and something will happen versus just the right position, the right sort of scale of screen and everything that just there is nothing fancy about it, it just works. Sebastian Kryh: And coming back to what we said a couple of minutes ago is that you gotta think about what you want to communicate and what do you want to send and how is that to be used in the flow of the customer journey? So in some sense just getting a touch application or interactivity. Working might sound like a cool thing on the design board, but how it's then implemented if it's not used by the sales team to be a sales companion, for example, how to utilize it then it might be just as you say, might be a gimmick or something that's not really encompassed and used in the day-to-day work life in the retail space. When you're working with partners, are you directly involved with the customers or are you at a relay point where your partner is talking to the customer and they're then coming back to you and saying, this is the functionality they would also like to have.  Sebastian Kryh: Yeah. So exactly. So we work with our partners and as I said, from time to time, we are also invited to talk to the brands and to the partner's customers. But many times we only learn of a project or of a brand when we see the order of licenses coming in. So of course, we work closely with our partners to figure out if they're closer to the end customers than we are. They debate on figuring out what's the worst market, what are they feeling or if it's in sync with what our product roadmap is. And from time to time, of course, we make alterations to it but we really feel it's important for us to own the product roadmap and understand how we want to evolve the product and try to encompass and use the feedback we get from our partners to add features or add workflows, but it might be right. So we try not to build on the project by project, but in more sense, this is an area where we need to improve or add. When that is built into a product it then can be used by all partners and all customers in some sense. So there's only one version of the product given point. Are you hearing or seeing much demand for audience measurement for analytics in store analytics?  Sebastian Kryh: It comes in waves. But yes, it's definitely a thing where we're seeing it and then over in Europe, we've seen that there's different ways of doing it. Going back. We used cameras a while back through legislation, the GDPR and data protection, that's no longer a thing, but definitely for certain projects, that's something that's been used, but not in the majority of the cases. Is that something you can, uh, provide within the platform or do you work with 3rd parties? Sebastian Kryh: We would work with 3rd parties to specify that in some sense. What we do is we build the product, which is to then retail focus where that's the market we're aiming for. But we also have a strategy to partner with the best as it's coming with sensors like for audience measurement, whether it be a radar or a camera, what it be. Then we have a few that we work with, then they will be better at making sure that the sensors are up to par and doing what they should be doing than we do it for them. So then we will partner and the same goes for retail media or do. We also see an increase in interest, especially retail media and how we then work with partners to do more of the advanced campaign management and bidding and such which were not built into our platform. Is that something you're feeling pressure to have built into your platform?  Sebastian Kryh: Not feeling pressure to have built into the platform. The partners we're working with and the ones we're talking to, future partners, they see they tend to like the idea of us being really good at what we do. And then when we can plug in or add in. For example, the retail media is a partner to us or software that does that, they seem to, in some sense, honest on what we are really good at. We feel that we don't have to solve all the problems in the world, and then we can take a niche product like that and add that. And then the offering gets and everybody's on top of the game.  I've wondered a lot about the whole retail media space because it's been extremely buzzy for the last year or so. And everybody's talking about it, but it still seems like the in store digital piece is just a little tiny piece of it. It gets mentioned, but I don't know that it's really front and center in many plans  Sebastian Kryh: I would say we're seeing an increased talk about retail media and I guess that's also coming in from when we're seeing articles written about the value of it and how you can monetize your network. But when it comes to rollouts, yes, there are definitely a few, but the majority is still the in-store experience and making sure you can communicate in a good and efficient way to your crowds as a branch. And when you're managing larger networks of thousands of screens, then you want to make sure that you have a platform or a CMS that, that works with that has those capabilities of everything from provisioning to remote management, software updates, of course, all these things that we sometimes take for granted. There's better ways of doing it than ours. I think we got a good set of features in that area.  One of the reasons that retail media is being buzzed or is so buzzy is this idea that in the same way that with e-commerce and online retailing, you've got traceability that you understand.  Somebody came on the site and they saw this and then they bought it. That's a conversion rate that they can establish. It's much harder to do in physical retail. Are you getting requests and pushes to somehow or other create some more visibility in terms of how this promotional spot was seen for this period of time? Sales went up X amount, based on AB samples, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that you could actually see that by using digital media in store, it had this net positive effect.  Sebastian Kryh: And in some sense that will be not trying to back out the question. That'd be more for our partner, right? That would sit and talk directly to the brand. But of course, we are responsible for what goes on screen. Then we would be able to tell, okay, these promotional ads were run at this specific time, like proof of play reports, for example, and then you need to cross reference that with the actual data from the point of sale saying, okay, we did these campaigns in these stores and sales went up 10 percent more than stores that didn't have the promotional ad. Let's go with that one. But it's more of a combination of us supplying our part and then someone that needs to crunch the data from our partner or from the retailer themselves.  So there's all kinds of discussions around integration with different kinds of business systems, including point of sale and inventory systems. Is that something more that your intermediary partner would sort through and you can provide the API for your piece of it in terms of play out logs and everything. Sebastian Kryh: Usually that's the way it's done today, where we would be able to feed. Our partner would be able to create the concept for the retail or they would be able to pull that data from us and that's what has actually been played and then add other parts of information to it. So we're not trying to hold on to the information, okay, we need all the pieces of the puzzle to be important. This is what we contributed with and we know we create value by it and then if you want to, you could add other dimensions to it, like quality sales, for example. Then do that math and see what's the ROI, for example. And there's definitely those projects or those robots that's measured on ROI, but I would say that the vast majority are not based on, okay, if we invest this much in screens, we want to see this much in sales. There are definitely those, but the most of them are coming back to the experience and feeling they want to create in their physical retail space and how can we make that better? And to that end, how do they know it's better? How do they, how do you measure experience?  Sebastian Kryh: That's a good question. I guess that's done in multiple ways from just the brand being feeling that this is the message we want to present, how we want to be seen and how we're doing it, and I know they've been doing surveys with customers saying, okay how do you feel this communication and this experience was compared to something else. But in some sense, that's not something that we are able to help much with, but then being able to work through our partners, creating the concepts, right? But I guess other parts where we're seeing also operational efficiencies is that when you integrate to like PIM or the dam systems where we can trigger content and then such, make sure that we have the right content running on screens depending on availability of stock or picking up the product photos and making sure that the content that's on screen is automated by a template instead of someone having to click around and drag files and pick the right naming of the product.  So those guys can focus on doing the analysis and the smartness and then we can have the system automate and create the content in an efficient way. Are you seeing your end user customers doing much in the back of the house is like staff facing displays versus purely displays that are aimed at retail shoppers.  Sebastian Kryh: I would say that 90% of the products are focused on the retail floor. And definitely screens are put in the break rooms and such to display other information. But, as it has been retail focused, the corporate communications part of it. It's not something that we've dug deep into but we have brands and partners using our software for that, of course.  You can display whatever you want on screen but the workflows and the product tend to look at the retail aspect of it and the floor.  The project starts with what the shoppers are going to see, not with what the staff are going to see. Sebastian Kryh: Exactly. That's a good way of putting it. In terms of retail technology there is a very large ecosystem. There's no end to companies providing different kinds of business systems and everything else into retail. Are you seeing any other technology companies that aren't pure play digital signage that are like POS companies that are starting to market digital signage capability saying, we do these other things for you. We can do this too. Sebastian Kryh: Yes. We've seen it and I don't have a name in my head right now but we've seen different views on it. There's always these places where we're doing really well, but we're really close to this area. Why don't we try and do that also? And we're quite confident in our abilities and experience that we are the ones that want to use our products. They want a few extra steps in capabilities within the platform.  So, if you want really basic capabilities, messaging does not going to change very often at all. There's no granularity to it. You just put something up in every store and leave it there for a month or something. Then any old system might be able to do that. But if you want any level of sophistication, you've got to go to something that's designed for it.  Sebastian Kryh: That's a good way of summarizing. Yes, there's many thousands of CMS out there, but there's when we're talking about the big ones that we maybe see as our competitors, there's more advanced features in it and making sure that you take the operational standpoint also from adding the screen to adding the license and making sure it runs and have the efficiency during that time, but also, when you want to do updates or how you want to monitor the hardware over time, making sure that so we catch errors before they happen, how we can have alarms for players not, of course, not being connected, but also having it content scheduling it's not valid.  For example, if you have scenarios or tags put in on the screen where we can see, okay, for this period of time, no scenario will be valid. The content on screen won't show anything, but fallback content, for example. So you want safety features built in to take care of those things or notify you at least of those and that's just one example of just going that extra little bit to make sure that you are taking care of the partners we're working with and also the end customers.  Many of the partners we work with, of course, have scheduling services. They offer that to the brand and the retailers, but quite a few retailers in our system are changing, updating and adding content together with our partner. So it needs to work with both the large-scale efficiency of the partner and also with the retailer logging in themselves, adding content to the local store, the local campaign or the regional campaign.  Are the Nordic companies in Northern Europe your primary market or are you all across Europe? Sebastian Kryh: We're all across Europe and from early days we've been, of course, very European companies. So Europe has been our major market, but we've been working out of Asia also. We do have business in Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, and then other parts of Southern Asia and been working partly with North America also, mainly Canada and a few cases in the US, which now it's as we talked, it's the magic step to take for a European company to enter the US market.  At the size we are at now, where we have a lot of good business and a good backbone in Europe, we're getting ready to take the step across the pond. We have a few partners, but we're definitely looking for more partners to help us engage in the U.S. market and the Canadian market for that matter.  Can you provide some background on how the company is owned and everything now? I'm reluctant to say the name of the owner because I'm going to mispronounce it. So I prefer you to do that. Sebastian Kryh: Vertiseit and the story behind that was to “advertise it” and we took out the “ad” in the beginning, so it just became Vertiseit.  All right, because I was thinking about Vertiseit and this and that. Sebastian Kryh: Yeah, but that's the story of it. And Vertiseit is today the holding company for two companies, Dise being one and Grsssfish being the other and.. GrassFish is in Austria. Sebastian Kryh: They're an Austrian company founded in Austria, exactly, but now fully owned by Vertiseit. Vertiseit's vision is to connect the world of retail and wants to be the leading platform company within digital in-store or in-store experience management Vertiseit purchased or acquired Dise in 2017 and started a journey of morphing the Dise journey from being a lot of on-prem and perpetual licenses to going into pure SaaS and focusing on the retail space and also clinging really tough too and true to the partner channel and how we only work with partners and reward loyal partners and coming into the other company within the group which has their own CMS or their own platform which they've been working on and they were acquired by the group in 2020.  For a few years after, they work with partners, not always through partners to serve the brands with added services as agency and agency services. So it's really the channel that differs the companies. Do the technologies get co-mingled at all? Or do you pretty much operate independently? Sebastian Kryh: We operate independently. So that we're two different companies and two separate softwares. But of course, some of the tech guys might talk, okay, how can we solve this? And how can we do that within the group or the market play or customer play?  It's two different companies and we have a Chinese wall in between us.  What happens when salespeople from both companies get a sniff at the same opportunity?  Sebastian Kryh: Then we both go at it and that's happened from time to time. There was one quite recently where the Grassfish heard of it and also a Dise partner heard of it independently and both ventured into the opportunity and went for it and it's handled as two separate things. So we fight for ourselves.  And the boss just says, you guys just be adults about it and let the best one win?  Sebastian Kryh: Exactly. But of course, it comes down to differences in the product test with all CMSs. They have slight differences in everything. And the one that won had the best offer with the best product match. So there's no decision made in top management. For this opportunity, we will put this one forward. If it's out there and if both are within their different channels markets, market strategies and waiting for the same then that's allowed and the brand will then choose which one they think is best for them and that's the one that should win.  All right, last question. What might we see out of Dise in 2024? What's coming?  Sebastian Kryh: We've been working on the CMS. We're getting really good rates about that and being more intuitive than ever. And I'd just like to mention just one thing before going to that is, we did a demonstration of the CMS for a now assigned partner. But a couple of months back was a potential partner. After demoing the CMS for 25 minutes and their response was, ‘Congratulations'.  That's something we took back as being really proud of. Of course, they had a few questions on details, but it's really intuitive and really nice to use. But what we see in 2024 is we'll add more to the playout part of it and how we can cover more operating systems as we're running today, the soft platforms and Windows platforms to do improvements there. So, that's a part of the CMS; of course, it's continuous improvement, but I think you'll see more and larger improvements or larger changes in the playout area.  And do you have a standard ISE?  Sebastian Kryh: We do have a standard ISE. We'd love for you to, of course, come by so we can show you some of the launch and the changes in ISE. So just take your time and swing by…  And show your latest pots of pans. Sebastian Kryh: Exactly. Right.  All right.  Sebastian Kryh: Yeah. Please come by and watch new things.  Terrific. All right. Thank you so much for spending the time with me.  Sebastian Kryh: Thank you so much for having me, David. It's been a pleasure.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Everybody who is active and experienced in the digital signage space knows the big evergreen challenge for solutions providers and end-users is content production - keeping programming on screens fresh and relevant, but also attractive. A lot of companies in the ecosystem - and not just the software guys - have some degree of template libraries and finished content that can be updated or pushed straight to screens. That's a piece of the solution. But there's also a demand for tools that make it easy and efficient to produce good-looking material for screens. In looking over the exhibitor list for the upcoming DSE trade show, I came across Design Huddle, and wondered, "Who is that and what do they do?" It's a small West Coast US startup that has B2B graphic design software that allows brands, agencies, and other platforms to create what it describes as lockable digital, video, print, and presentation templates for their users. There are some similarities to solutions like Canva, but also a lot of distinctions. The one that would particularly interest a lot of tech companies in this industry is the ability to fully integrate and white label the Design Huddle toolset inside something like a CMS. I haD a great chat with CEO and co-founder Dave Stewart, who is based (I'm jealous) in Huntington Beach, California. Yeah, there's LA traffic, but it's lovely by the water ... Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Dave, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what the Design Huddle is all about? Because it's unfamiliar to me.  Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. Ultimately, we are an enterprise focused on software as a service platform that focuses on templating and content creation in an easy and accessible way. We're definitely API-first, so we have a big focus on platform integrations where our customers are programmatically creating content, but then we're also really focused on end-user experience so people who are actually designing, whether that's static content or motion content in a browser, are able to really easily fill in pieces of a video template or create content really for any purpose. What kind of content would they be creating in the context of digital signage, which is obviously what I'm interested in?  Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we were actually really surprised. We're relatively new to digital signage, and within the last year, we had to get up to speed ultimately because a couple of players in this industry came to us and really expressed, “Hey, content is a big issue for us, right? We can sell these really expensive screens and they're great, but our customers are just really struggling with what are we going to put on them and how's that going to look good, right? We can have a great-looking screen without good-looking content, so there's a problem.”  So, I've been educating ourselves on this very recently, and it's really a combination of things like static content where it's like, I'm just displaying basic information that might be somewhat real-time or just informational, then also, motion content for things like, imagine the signs that are up on a football stadium or in a basketball gym, where you want to show basic animated content, that's talking about whatever the context is for that sport or things like that. So it's been a little bit of everything, but imagine anything that can be shown on a sign, someone's creating that somewhere, right?  Right. Is the core idea that the end user, the operator would be selecting from a template library or are they creating stuff from scratch or how does it work? Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. We are actually just the software. We're not actually playing in the content game ourselves. We just make it really easy to create content on our platform, and generally, that's going to mean importing from existing design files and animation files that you've created elsewhere. We can import PDFs and maintain all the layers. So any static content that's generated in any Adobe product or Figma, we can essentially just import it in and maintain that. In After Effects, you can now export to a format called Lottie files and Lottie files can be imported into our system and now essentially we can have really rich animations generating After Effects that are really easily customizable by an end user and also programmatically via API. So that's the starting point for most of our customers is generating their content on their side, whether they're contracting with an agency or they have a team internally, it's building these things. The main thing they're focused on is, we just don't want to have to do these customs per customer. I was super surprised to find out that some of the initial interest from us, these hardware companies have content teams that are literally generating content individually for their customers and to me, that was crazy. but they had to, because that was the way they were going to sell their hardware.  So we're just changing that a bit where it's like, just do that once, right? Generate some templates for them and then give them the power, empower them to actually make the changes for themselves, or, again, do it programmatically for them. So I'm curious. Is this the sort of thing that is best suited to somebody who's already a motion graphics designer, an animator, somebody with quite a deep set of creative skills or maybe technical skills?  Dave Stewart: I would say a big focus of ours is when it comes to who we are going to sell to. Definitely, software companies are high up on that list who have a general system that's trying to do a lot of things and specifically in digital signage, that might be a CMS or any of these other acronyms that we've come to find out exist here where they're trying to do a lot of things. We're just the content piece, and we feel like we can really stand out by creating a best-in-breed, seamlessly integrated white-labeled product that can fit into their platform in a way that feels proprietary but adds best-of-breed, innovative content creation ability. Now, when it comes to who's creating that content whether they have an internal design team with some expertise or whether they contract an agency just to initially create them a set of templates, it can work either way. I will also say, though, that we do work with brands directly, where brands are creating branded content that might be shown on lots of screens but they want to empower regular users to be able to make changes to those templates while still adhering to brand consistency and their brand guidelines and so like our locking feature is big in that situation because someone creates a template but then now anybody can actually make basic adjustments to it. So it sounds like it's a little reminiscent of what I've been hearing in the last year about AI and how generative AI isn't going to really replace designers, but it does add a considerable layer of efficiency in that you can remove some of the drudgery and some of the building block stuff and automate that or streamline that but it's not meant to just take designers out of the equation. Dave Stewart: No, definitely not. I feel like we're really excited about AI and everyone says that, but I'll get more specific for you. I think, for us right now, we actually just sent out an AI survey to our customers to try to prioritize the main things that they're really interested in. For us, the basic stuff, like background removal, like removing background from images, which we already do, and background from videos. You have things like speech-to-text to provide like auto captioning and things like that. Obviously, generative AI, where you're prompting via text to say, “Hey, I want an image that shows this, or I want to alter this one image to include this”, all those things fit in really well with what we do, but where we want to take that even further is, okay, let me generate a whole bunch of template ideas for you that are basic iteration changes from a set of templates that we may train a model on. So we're actually gonna take all your content you've made and the holy grail for us is, let us shoot out and show you a bunch of previews of a bunch of similar-looking templates that follow the same kind of styles, maybe themes or layouts. But in a new way you're still starting with the designer that needs to set the standard but you're able to generate content in a much quicker way and remove a lot of the monotonous activity that's usually involved there.  So what would be involved in using it? Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. So typically what will happen is, again, two sides of our business. We have a platform side where we're going to be very hands-on with our customers and integrate this into some platform that they already have, where there are already users where they need to add on templating or improve some existing content creation suite that they have inside that. So, we would inherit those users and they seamlessly became part of that platform. The other side of the business is, okay, their turnkey solution where we might work with an agency or brand directly. We white label it and they log into a portal that like we create, but it's white labeled for you on your domain. and the idea is that a user is just signing up and accessing a template in a way where you are just a distribution mechanism to provide them content that way. Either way, it's going to be in the context of a browser, whether that's on desktop or mobile and generally it's going to be filling out a template that someone has gotten you, let's call it 80 percent of the way there. Okay. So like you were saying earlier, it's not really that you would go in and say, I want to do a 15-second promotional spot for a car dealer and I would go find a template that seems to be about retail or car dealers or whatever it may be and I can monkey around with that. This is more important than what you already have and automating and making it much more efficient to do that sort of thing. Dave Stewart: Honestly, I think it's both. We have some customers that definitely fall more in the former, for sure, where they have more generic content that they're trying to reach a lot of people with and they're creating more generic content that could be used for different purposes while still allowing the user to really personalize it for themselves. But then, we also have customers that are trying programmatically.  So, let's walk through the car dealer one then. If I'm Bob's shovels in Fairbanks, Alaska or whatever it may be and I want to create five ads for our fall clearance event and I don't have Motion graphics animator on my team or anything like that. What would I do?  Dave Stewart: Yeah. No, absolutely. So in that situation, again, they're not necessarily like someone that small isn't going to be our customer directly. We're going to inherit them from the fact that they work with some other company, whether that's an agency or they have digital signage. Let's imagine that. They bought a digital sign and part of that came a subscription to some sort of content creation suite and we just designed how it all just so happens to power that content creation suite. That would be the scenario where we might be involved with a small business like that. In that situation, that would entail that the agency or the hardware company that is providing that software suite has created some basic templates for this type of customer, which is exactly what we're seeing happen by the way.  and again, I was very surprised about this, that these hardware companies would actually have content teams doing this but that's exactly what's happening. and so, the content teams are just really excited that they don't have to do super personalizing custom graphics, both motion and static for the customer anymore. They can just create templates and let the customer have them themselves.  So one of the main reasons that end users and solutions providers to some degree struggle with all of this in terms of content is cost. Agency costs are higher and everything else and the idea of these kinds of tools is attractive for a number of reasons. But one of them is, this will lower my costs of producing content. I assume you guys have done some sort of calculations to say to your potential customers that if you use our stuff, you can potentially save this kind of money. Dave Stewart: Yeah. Ultimately, not that we're in the business of replacing designers that you might already have on staff, but most of the time we're getting brought in a situation where there's a design team and currently what they're super focused on is super monotonous, non creative work where they're taking a Photoshop file and making basic text changes and dropping in images. and think about the salary of someone like that and what you're paying for. We would say, we're not trying to replace that person but let's focus that, some of that person on something actually creative, that's going to move the needle for your business, not on this monotonous work that could absolutely be done by the user themselves in a simple templating solution. So, that's how we'd approach it and so when we talk about cost savings, again, you could think about the fact that, Hey, this salary is gone, but ultimately we'd say, no, let's just repurpose that salary for something useful. Okay.  So do you want to go back to skill sets? What realistically do you need to use this? You're going to be a designer or something already?  Dave Stewart: Yeah. I would say, look, Canva is a really interesting thing to look at because Canva came on the scene and showed everyone that a platform like this in the browser can be really easy to use and we can remove a lot of the friction and difficulty that's been associated with static and motion content in the past. And so Canva has really educated the market on what's possible and that anybody can kind of design following templates and ultimately, I would say, while we're not trying to be Canva whatsoever, there's clearly a lot of overlap in what we do in terms of a simple user interface, a really easy to create templating solution. The big differentiation there is clearly that we're fully white labels and we're embedding this into some proprietary solution, typically in a way that really well fits into that ecosystem, whatever it might be in a seamless way.  So, how did the company get started?  Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned, digital signage is relatively new for us and we're really excited about it, but ultimately, we operate in other verticals, so the opportunity originally was more like as we do in terms of media types, we support print, even large format prints. For instance, we were at ISA earlier this year and our focus going to that was actually more on non-digital billboards and things like that. That was actually really interesting, by the way, as an aside, because, on the plane ride there, some people behind me were talking about one of our larger customers who's actually a major player in digital signage and it opened my eyes to, wow, this is a much bigger company than I even realized. and they're having content issues. There must be lots of additional opportunities here. So, going into that show, again we shifted and pivoted. It's like, Hey, you know what? Digital signage is actually a bigger opportunity than we thought. But to answer your question, again, starting in some of those other media types, we just saw the need for really simple white labeled, digital content creation, whether that be for ads, whether that's just basic social media graphics and posts and basic print collateral. There are lots of sites that are just offering like, whether that's a printing website or whether that's an agency just providing content to their users. Content is content and at the end of the day and it can be all sorts of things. We've really just focused on how do we create a really consistent experience for both motion and static? How can we really seamlessly tie together? Even like print and digital content in a really simple to use easy editor and that has ended up applying to lots of industries and it's been really exciting to find that out  In terms of the business itself, what would be the breakdown roughly of what you're doing for print, what you're doing for online, what you're doing for digital display, like digital signage is digital signage?  Is digital signage a big component of it, or is it just something you're trying to educate the market on and grow? Dave Stewart: Yeah. Honestly, like I mentioned, we've just gotten into digital signage recently, so clearly it's not a huge piece of the pie yet. We do have very large goals in digital signage Though, we actually do see digital signage being a pretty decent slice of the pie, within the next two years, but as of right now, I'd say that it's hard because of the number of customers versus actual revenue. A lot of our revenue is tied to digital, for sure. So, there are a lot of use cases for ads, social media graphics, things like that, which were our bread and butter. We have a lot of print-focused customers. The revenue is not as high there. There's just more of them, quantity-wise. But I would say that both of those are fairly client counts evenly split. It's definitely skewed more revenue-wise toward digital and what's been really interesting is a lot of these digital-focused, even with social media. They are the ones that push us into video, right? So, like motion content, as it pertains to digital signage, we were already creating HD-quality video just to try to serve that digital market with a priority to know about digital signage. So it's been really interesting to see that a lot of the things that we've done can apply in other areas and it's really just about how we can make a better mousetrap when it comes to end user simplicity of content customization and then programmatic API first control of a platform like this?  Are you constrained at all in terms of formats and resolutions and things like that are obviously day to day things in digital signage? Dave Stewart: Yeah, what's really cool is that from the beginning, we've made it really easy to do basic resizing and that an end user could actually resize. So, if there's a slightly different aspect ratio as we can obviously find very frequently on digital signage. Our algorithm will automatically move things around for you and try to keep the design kind of integrity maintained. Now that doesn't work perfectly when you have huge aspect ratio shifts, like clearly if you're going portrait to landscape, it's not going to necessarily work as well. But yeah, it is a big component of this. I would say that on the other side of it, on the programmatic side, we will have customers that will create different templates for slightly different aspect ratios and then ultimately they'll use our API to populate all of them at once with the same data. So you're now spitting out a whole bunch of creativity at one time, leveraging the same data images, text colors, all of it. Now you've just generated a whole pack for users that might have signs of different sizes. So in terms of outputs, you can do HD video.  Dave Stewart: Absolutely. Yeah. Now we haven't gotten into a 4k yet. There hasn't been demand because typically 4k is going to be created on professional desktop software. We can do it and we are thinking we're going to get pushed into that. and honestly, it's just going to take one customer that kind of just tells us they really need it to pull the trigger on it, but absolutely, 1080p video we've been doing from the beginning.  And are there any other issues around the output files? Like the video is 30 frames per second, that sort of thing? Dave Stewart: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So we're trying to follow all the industry standards there and honestly, even if a client has very specific requirements when it comes to Codecs and it comes to specific quality of specific items. We're a very customizable platform like we have settings for all of those things that we can match what you need. One of the bigger things has been transparent video. So, we actually are one of the few browser tools that actually supports transparent video, which is difficult because it's not cross browser. There's not one format that works cross browser on that and so importing transparent video files and maintaining them is obviously huge for things like background removal and things like that. But that's been a big one because combining that with our support for Lottie files, which I mentioned Lottie files earlier, but they're really exciting what you can do with them and that plus just bit motion clips that you've either pulled from our stock libraries or that you've shot yourself. Putting all that together, there's a lot of really cool things you can do and they're now attainable by a user who's not a professional motion graphic artist. So yeah, it's really cool. What's possible now.  So I'm very curious about the programmatic piece, and I think for people listening, it's important to understand we're not talking about programmatic advertising here where you're talking about programmatic content creation. Dave Stewart: Yeah, and I will say the overlap there is we do have some clients that are in ads and they will actually use our template platform to do A/B testing on those ads where we'll pass in slightly different colors, slightly didn't copy, to generate a bunch of creatives at once. That's our overlap in the ad space, but yes, when we talk about programmatic, I really just talk about programmatic content creation and the fact that with our API, you can generate all sorts of variations of content very quickly, including videos. We have some clients that don't even show our editor to the user. It's really just about, Hey, I want to generate a video that's 15 seconds from this template where it incorporates the customer's brand, their colors and their tagline and their company name. So, spit this out and show them this. It's that easy, right? You don't even have to have them open the editor and do it themselves. Can you give me a good example of how. You could use APIs and data tables and everything else to automate the production of a whole bunch of media pretty quickly.  Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. So if you are at a campaign that you were pushing, where you're really just trying to get out consistent messaging and you were needing to do that again, I won't even limit this to digital signage because a lot of our clients will choose us because of the fact that we can operate there and across their other marketing collateral at the same time.  But the idea would be if the messaging is the same and you already have branded templates that are the starting point for a lot of different content you might be creating, great. Pass in the mess, the specific messaging, pass in specific keywords to generate images or pass in the specific images directly. Let us fill all of those in at once and generate a whole campaign pack for you in one shot. What about for scale? Let's say you have, I don't know, a retailer that has 800 locations across North America and they want to be hyperlocal about the marketing or messaging or, “Here's our store manager for this location” or whatever. They have a template. They want to knock out 800 unique versions of this or with some variations on it. What kind of time is involved in doing that?  Dave Stewart: It's a great question. I'm glad you brought that model because we were actually operating in the franchise space before we even looked into digital signage at all because franchises specifically that have these locations all over the place had this issue with print, had this issue with social media that's been around for a very long time and so they would come to us because what will happen is those store managers or locations are either one requesting individual personalized graphics from the corporate design team on a very regular basis and kind of and completely, taking off all their time doing that, or two, they're going rogue and building off-brand content and it looks terrible and the marketing manager is finding it online and is just pissed off.  So one of those two things is happening and where we would come in is look, the only way that you're going to solve that is if you make it easy for them, because if it's not easy, they're going to try and do it themselves. or if they have to wait for you to do it for them, they will do it themselves. So the only way to do it is, Hey, how do we make this such an easy process that anybody can come in and feel like this is going to be the fastest way anyway and it's also going to look great. Why not use that? So ultimately what will happen is, again, the brand manager, corporate team, or whoever is going to create the template. Ultimately, that franchise, franchisee, that store manager, whoever it is, is going to log into the system and they're going to find the template.  If they just and , most of the time, these are super locked down. So I have this template and ultimately, I just want to let the store put their store hours right here and maybe some sort of sale information on a specific percentage discount on something, whatever that thing might be and so literally, the user is just going to click that, change the text and then export it, right? It doesn't take any time whenever you've really focused on the template.  So yeah, they can't go in and change it to Comic Sans or put in a picture of their dog or whatever.  Dave Stewart: No, our locking feature is something we spent a lot of time on. You can take it very far. Most of our clients will lock down almost everything, but we've made it to where you have full control over exactly what users can and can't do.  You were talking earlier about Canva and there are a few kinds of platforms out there that are variations on this, or do some of what you're doing. I'm also thinking about Promo and Shaker Media over in Korea. When you get asked about your company versus those kinds of companies, particularly Canva, what do you say?  Dave Stewart: Yeah, no, absolutely. It's really interesting because, again, we don't really compete with Canva, like even with Canva Enterprise solution, we don't really compete with them because ultimately, customers are coming to us because they want this white-labeled and embeddable into their own platform or make it seem proprietary. They want to have control.  Right now, when you go to Canva, you have no control, right? They control the interface. They control the layout. They control the flow. You have zero say in terms of what the user then can do and where they can go and go off crazy and get lost inside the Canva ecosystem. We're like the opposite, right? The whole goal of this is you make it what you want. You show exactly what you want. You lock down what you want and it looks like it's yours and that's why people are going to come to us.  A lot of overlap and functionality, like you said, when it comes to content creation, features and things like that, we definitely have focused on more of some of the more niche-specific things that Canva hasn't, like for instance, for print, we have full CMYK capability, Canva doesn't really. It's a conversion process for them, but we started from the ground up. For large format prints, we support really large format printing for things like large banners and things. That's not something you're really going to do on Canva. For video, this idea that we can support, like these, Lottie files and transparent video, like Canva just launched Lottie files, but their implementation is really simple where you can only really use basic, almost GIF-type content. We've taken it way further. We just go deeper on the more professional aspects and then, again, are more focused on the white-label, embeddable nature of it.  You have a booth of some kind at Digital Signage Experience. I assume you're there to start building partnerships and creating awareness that you exist. If I'm a CMS software company, that is probably the best example, what kind of work is involved if I say, “This is awesome, I'd love to integrate this into my overall solutions offer and have it white labeled.” Is that a three-month journey, a twelve-month journey, or allocating five people to work on it for a month or just how does all that come together? Dave Stewart: Yeah, that's a great question. Now we're really excited about DSE coming up. This is the first time we're even attending and we're really excited to exhibit based on, again, what we've heard and who's going to be there. So super excited about that and I'd say that when it comes to who we're trying to reach there and understanding how it would work to work with us, for a CMS company, honestly, our messaging, you'll see this in our booth is all about and we feel like you've ever actually tried to do some level of content creation already as part of a platform and so our messaging is mostly, “Hey, let's upgrade that. Let's make that a little better. Let's improve that inside of your system because we can do that and make it still feel like it's yours.”  So that is our focus in terms of messaging to them and I would say that in terms of the actual implementation for a company like that, we have a lot of walk-before-you-run type solutions when it comes to integrations. So a lot of our customers will actually start by initially just using our kind of turnkey portal that we have out of the box and then getting their initial customer buying on there and starting to create the templates that way, before actually doing the deep integration. While they're doing that, they're slowly starting to build the integration in and they could do a really basic integration where they're mostly just embedding all of our components in a simple way and then facilitating fairly basic workflows and then that's like a starting point. Then we would say that the next step is, okay, how do we incorporate some of the other data that you have in your CMS to do the automatic population of content where we can take event-specific information or location-specific information and start injecting it automatically, leveraging our API. So that would be like a second step and then how do we make sure that this feels seamless at every part of your workflow, maybe that's a third step. So we would say that a really basic integration takes a team one or two months, typically, just to get started and then we would say that if you're doing something really deep, maybe a few months after that, over time, starting to get it ingrained more and more. And what are the commercial aspects of this? If I am a CMS software company, I think this is really intriguing. What's it going to cost me to work with Design Huddle?  Dave Stewart: Yeah. So again, being enterprise-focused, we found that there are no two customers alike. We actually assign what we call personas to their end users and we say, we have some customers, like their users come into the system once a year and we have some customers where they're using the system every day. We can't price that the same; it's going to be a little bit different. When we talk about API-driven fully use cases where there's no end-user or direct interaction with our editor, that's a little simpler because we can just price it based on API activity and it's fairly straightforward. But when we talk about end users, no users are the same, so we actually do a pretty custom proposal process for customers and we dig into their specific use cases and try to assign a persona to these users. Still, ultimately, the idea would be that, in a user-based kind of pricing proposal like that, the more users you bundle, the bigger discount there is and then we have overage tiers where the cost per user gets cheaper as they grow.  The idea is that we're scaling together and things get cheaper and you get to get more profitable over time.  But for the purposes of referencing this, I'm sure there are people listening, thinking this is really interesting, but is this going to cost me like a quarter million dollars or something?  Dave Stewart: Oh, no!  It's $500 for Starter, $750 a month for Pro and then you've got Enterprise and as you said, that depends on all kinds of variables.  Dave Stewart: Yeah and each one of those, just to be clear, includes a certain number of users, right? and the number of users that's included, again, is getting into what I was just trying to describe as it can vary a little bit. But yes, we're definitely not a quarter-million-dollar product, starting point, right? We have a basic setup fee, which is usually in the low thousand s and then, in the hundreds typically for most initial engagements or low thousand s.  For that setup, that's because you're going to spend all this time working with your partner companies to sort out how to do this. Dave Stewart: We are very hands-on. I know a lot of companies say that, but honestly, for us, it's a huge waste of our time to spend a lot of time with you upfront, try to get it going and then it does not succeed. So we do everything we possibly can at the beginning of the engagement to make sure that you have the tools you need. We actually create custom documentation for every customer that lays out exactly what they need to do based on a consultation session where we talk through the specific platform, what they need to do, what they're trying to accomplish, give them tips and tricks and advice based on what we've seen successful for other customers. That's all part of it. In addition, obviously, training for content creation, like getting your templates in the system. All of that is very front-loaded and so that's where our setup fee is really focusing on that initial time we're going to spend with you to make sure that it's successful. Yeah, I've certainly seen some setup fees from software companies where I thought, okay, that's just a cash grab. But that definitely doesn't sound like the case here. Dave Stewart: No, it really isn't. Honestly, we're probably doing that at a cost, to be honest and then the idea is that once you're in, it's a great thing, like as much as we make our team available around the clock to answer, to always be around support wise, like we hear, as you can imagine, less and less from clients over time, right? So if we can make them successful at the beginning, They're really easy long term and we're just growing together and they're happy and, then, all of our support costs are front-loaded for that reason.  You're a virtual company, West Coast. How many people are in the company? Dave Stewart: So yeah, the latest count is, I'm about to hire another one, so around 12-13. We're relatively small.  Canva's got 3,500 or something like that?  Dave Stewart: Oh yeah and it's fun, right? We're a really nimble team. You know, this is my second go-around. My last company, I took it to about 150 employees before I exited, so we're still pretty early on our journey here and that's really exciting for us because we see so much opportunity in this.  I do expect this to grow a lot in the next two years. but we are a lean team of seasoned and professional software professionals and we're able to do a lot with a fairly small team right now.  And is this bootstrapped or venture-backed? Dave Stewart: Yeah, great question. My previous company actually started in the 2009 timeframe when everything crashed and there was really no money going around the way that it was capitalized. It ended up biting me in the end, and it left a bad taste in my mouth.  So going into this, my partners and I were really trying to bootstrap this from the beginning. I wanted full control over how this is going to work. That said, very early on, we had a large company come to us and say, “Hey, we really want to use you guys, but we're too worried about whether you're going to be around next year.” That company is Smartsheet, right? They own a company called Brand folder, which was the one interested in us. Smartsheets is a public company, they're very large, so they ended up becoming a small minority partner. They did basically a strategic round with us. That's a very small percentage, but ultimately it gives a lot of people a little bit more comfortability working with us because they're our backstop. The only reason that they invested was really just to make sure that we were going to stick around because they were going to be so invested in us. So they're there for that reason that said we are fully, sustainably and profitable at this point. So we, actually, are currently setting our own. Of course, we're in a really good position and we're excited about that coming from my previous experience. If people are going to DSE, they'll be able to find you on the exhibit floor and I know you're coming to the mixer; and if they want to find you online, how do they do that? Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. They can definitely check out our website, designhuddle.com. You can reach out to schedule some time with us. We are doing some of the DSE kind of promotional material. You may have just seen an email about us there where you can schedule some time with us at the show. but yeah, we would love to hear from you. We'd love to talk with everyone. As I mentioned, we're excited to learn more about this industry and get deeper into it and we'd love to have all the conversations we need to figure that out. Great. All right, thank you, Dave. Much appreciated.  Dave Stewart: Awesome. Thanks so much, Dave. It was a pleasure.