Podcasts about av it

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 23, 2024 36:27

Sonos is about to flex so hard at ISE their booth needs its own area code (and wait'll you see their pro installation debut!). Reality check - when's the last time you gave your AV standards more than just a casual swipe right? DSE is ghosting Vegas for San Diego's sunny shores in 2025!Tune in to AVWeek, where Tim Albright and industry experts serve up the hottest tea on the latest developments in the commercial AV world! Break down the DSE's power move to SoCal, Sonos's explosive ISE takeover, and the not-so-subtle art of keeping your AV/IT standards up to date and explore how evolving standards are shaking up the game in our hyper-connected world.Host: Tim AlbrightGuests:Dawn Meade – Dawn on TwitterMatt Scott – Omega Audio VideoTom Aburthnot – Empowering.CloudLinks to sources:AV Magazine – Sonos' First Speaker for CommercialrAVe Pubs – DSE 2024 Highlights, plans for 2025Article3 – IT & AV StandardsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Simplifying AV Management Through The Network | AVWeek 695

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Play Episode Listen Later Dec 16, 2024 30:33

Cloud revolution, converged networks, and sustainability are transforming the AV landscape! The industry is redefining Device Management like Tesla disrupted the auto industry. Industry leaders are breaking down AV and IT barriers. Crestron becomes the first AV manufacturer to achieve sustainability certification.This week, industry experts join us to explore the latest trends in commercial AV, including Xyte's innovative cloud platform, the evolution of converged AV/IT networks offering cost savings and improved management, and Crestron's strides in environmental responsibility, addressing IT departments' focus on energy cost savings and sustainability.Host: Tim AlbrightGuests:Kelly Teel – Kelly on LinkedInRon Callis – OneFireflyMike Gleason – UtelogyLinks to sources:AVNation – Xyte's First AV Cloud SummitCommercial Integrator – Crestron Attains SAVe CertificationInavate On The Net – Converged Networks & AV SystemsNotes:AVNation studios production equipment provided by Shure and Vaddio.Select Nominees for our AVNation Readers' Choice Awards 2024 here! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

S E662: AVWeek 662: Standard AV over IP

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 29, 2024 28:55

In this latest episode of AVWeek with Tim Albright and industry experts delved into the latest trends shaping enterprise operations in 2024! From the convergence of AV/IT to the rise of data dashboards and the significance of 8K solutions, they explored how technology was transforming the way businesses operated and communicated. Plus, they discussed how Dante AV networked video was elevating the visual experience at Grace Community Church, and how Bose Professional was expanding its U.S. operations with a new sales model. Listeners learned about the agility of software-defined solutions versus hardware limitations, the importance of C-level recognition of platform solutions, and how AV integrators were embracing IT protocols for a more interconnected future. They also discussed about SDI cable, emphasizing their importance in delivering high-quality video signals in professional AV setups. Finally, the podcast underscored the significance of AV education in staying ahead of industry trends, ensuring professionals remain informed and equipped to navigate the evolving landscape of commercial AV.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Gil Matzliah, Novisign

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 19, 2023 31:59

I bumped into Gil Matzliah at a conference this summer, and told the software executive we were long overdue to do a podcast about what's happening with his company, Novisign. We finally nailed down a date and time, and as it turned out, it was just days after the horrendous violence that broke out in Israel - where Matzliah and his company are based. We chatted about the situation and the impacts on his company. He's fine, his family and staff are fine, but everyone is understandably rattled. We then got into the roots of Novisign does, what's different about its CMS solution, and what they're seeing and hearing in the marketplace. Novisign was an early adopter of Android and it remains its primary go-to operating system. Though Israeli, more than half of its business comes from the US and another quarter from Europe. And now the company is growing business in Japan. Transcript Gil, thank you for joining me. You're in Israel, where a few days later things went crazy there. I have to ask, how are things going? How are you? And I assume the family's fine and everything? Gil Matzliah: Yeah. Thank you for your concern. Yes, me and my family are all good, also the team members that are here in Israel are good. Last Saturday was a very hard day in Israel. It's something we never expected would happen. But now we are good. Your offices are pretty close to the West Bank, aren't they? Gil Matzliah: Yeah. So, Israel is a small and tiny country. It's not too big. So everything is close to everything. Our office is close to the West Bank, the conflict and all the issues you hear now in the news have been in the south area of Israel with the border of the Gaza Strip. I hope everything continues to be fine for you and things settle down there. Gil Matzliah: Yeah, we also hope so. At the end of the day, we like to work, we like to have peace, everybody wants to build good things together and so do our neighbors. In NoviSign, we have Arab Muslims, Christians from all around the world, Jewish people, we all work happily together and that's what we hope the world will go for. It's just this thing with the Gaza Strip that... and there's an organization called Hamas, who is making the issues and challenges for our regions, which I hope will be better moving forward. Has staffing been affected at all? Have you had members of your staff be called up to the military? Gil Matzliah: Yeah, in many countries, they call some of the stuff but you can say it's less than 10% for a team all the time one or two people in total. Yeah, it's just one of those things which you can't help but be directly affected in some way because of the size of the country and the way things operate, right? Gil Matzliah: Exactly. Yes. All right. So enough of that. I don't want to dwell on it and no doubt by the time that things will have changed and hopefully gotten better. Just for the benefits of people who maybe don't know your company, can you run down what you do, how long you've been around and how you distinguish yourself in the marketplace as NoviSign. Gil Matzliah: Perfect. So, we are NoviSign. We do digital signage software. Our company is based in Israel and provides services from all around the world. We have people in the US, Germany and Japan. With a team of more than 200 partners all around the world, we give a global software as a service for digital signage. I started a company with my colleague, Avi 12 years ago. It was 2011. We established it here in Israel, with the dream to be a great startup, changing the world and leading the digital signage software. Have you changed the world? Gil Matzliah: It's not so easy but we're sure we'll do it. We are making changes. We are progressing. Opening a startup 12 years ago, that's a long journey and like a roller coaster, you go up, you go down, but you keep going forward all the time. And after a few years, we started to see the good results coming and since then we are growing and growing constantly every year. Good. So if you were lined up against, let's say, 10 other CMS software companies out there and somebody said, all right, I've looked at all these other ones. What is it about you guys that's distinctive and different and important? What would you say? Gil Matzliah: Yeah. So, first it's the team. We came with a lot of experience in software programming. We are technical people. We are software programming people. We have opened the company to lead in the platforms that enable people to do that. So, it's the team that you work with. It's the technology behind the servers, the player, the communication, the integration and it's the offering that we have. We have a wide offering, which is very reliable and secured and trusted by thousands of customers around the world. You mentioned security and I know you're SOC 2 certified. Was that important to do? I'm hearing more and more from a variety of different companies saying that the security piece of this is really important, maybe much more so than it was even a couple of years ago. Gil Matzliah: That's correct. So more and more organizations are looking at security, but also it's the maturity of the company. So when NoviSign started with few installations, what you are busy with is just building software that works. And then after it works, you start adding more and more features. And when we started, we were looking at a small and medium businesses. But slowly, as people saw, we have a nice, easy to use platform, then the bigger companies started wanting it. But when you go for a bigger company, and as time changes, all these medium and large companies today want better security, they looki at all these RFPs, abd you really need good security in order to get these customers. Have you evolved like a lot of companies have, where they started with the small to medium business market and now they're more focused on enterprise? Gil Matzliah: We are not focusing on enterprise yet, but this is the growth engine that we have. So if you had asked me like five years ago, we wouldn't work with banks, insurance companies or bigger Fortune 500 companies. But if you look recently in the last five years, we started to work with a few banks and corporations and insurance companies worldwide and there is the bigger number of bigger business we work with now. I'm curious when you say five years ago, you wouldn't have worked with a big bank or somebody like that. Is that because your platform wasn't ready for it or a very large customer, as I've said to some other people in the past, they could be great, but they can kill your company because they just get so involved and they can be so needy? Gil Matzliah: It's a good point. So if I look at that, I can tell you an interesting story. Like a year or two after we opened the company and we have the website and we started to do promotions and we started to go to shows and I'm sitting in my home and suddenly I'm getting, today we have people in the US, but back then we were just in Israel, and a call was redirected for me from the US and it was the MTA of the New York transportation company asking about our platforms. And you're not really ready for these types of companies when you are less than 10 people, a small company with a new product. But once you are in almost 10 years or so, and you have enough people to support, enough understanding of the security, the features, the integrations, the platforms, then you get ready to serve the bigger companies. You work with a lot of different platforms and therefore hardware partners. I know you're on Android, you're on different SOC platforms for smart displays, all that sort of thing. Is it a challenge to manage the variety of, they're all are just similar in certain respects, most of them are Linux in some way or another, but how easy or hard is it to stay on top of all those different ones? Gil Matzliah: It is a good point. It is a good challenge because looking at that, when you're a small company and at the beginning we started with Android. I think we've been one of the first, if not the first, to develop an Android based player, an APK back in 2011. There are more and more people on Android, it's not the most of them. And then we started to add ithers, we added Windows, we added Chrome, we added Linux, now we are adding HTML Player, we are adding Tizen, we are adding WebOS, and we're adding more and more features. It's becoming very complex to support them all because once you have a change, you need to see it's working on all the platforms. And when you speak about the Android platforms, just the Android platform has so many versions. And we even have, lately, forced all our customers with Android that is less than 6.0 to stop using the system because until half a year ago, there were people that were still using Android 4.4 with us and the difference between Android 4 and Android 12 is huge. So imagine that fixed security support, as you say it's becoming to be more and more challenging and you need to grow the team and it's slower for you to add new features because you need to see that it's working on all the platforms, but we do believe we should be always hardware agnostic because what is differentiating a CMS software from a Samsung LG and all the other display manufacturers that are doing the software is that we work with all the platforms and they work just with their platforms. So we keep it as a focus for us. Is technology enabling you to go towards being operating system agnostic without having to make compromises in terms of, yes, we can work across all of these different platforms, but we can't do everything on each of them or whatever, which I've heard versus, natively written software that's native to Tizen, native to WebOS and so on. Gil Matzliah: Yeah, it's hard to do 100 percent of your features on all the platforms. Not all the platforms, not all the OS work equally. So our main player from the first day until today is the Android, which we can do 100 percent of our capabilities. When you go to Tizen or WebOS, you are limited in some way, and then you need to give away some features sometimes when you're developing your platform. Are you finding that the marketplace end users and your reseller partners are starting to settle in on certain solutions, like they're settling in on Android or whatever it may be? Gil Matzliah: I think you probably know better than me the hardware, the platforms, the ways to do digital science is like a big jungle. There are so many things and choices, even the software, you always say that there are many more CMS platforms. So there are so many varieties there. So I don't see anybody locking on anything and that's why we keep the diversity to be able to support the most. For the technical people at AV companies that are just starting to get into digital signage or the AV IT people for end user customers. Do they look at this space and go, come on guys, can you just establish some standards and continuity and not have all these varieties of options? Gil Matzliah: They're asking for that. We are asking for that. I think the world needs that. The one thing, we do see that Android, since we started 12 years ago, and imagine 12 years ago, you didn't even have a set up box of an Android, or just the first one was just coming in 2012, like the year after we started, or the first year of NoviSign. And today, most of the world, most of the set up boxes around the world are Android based. So we do see that Android... both the system on chip and both of the players have been the main platforms for digital signage. For us for sure, more than half of our installation and most of our installations are Android based either with a player or with a system of chip. I find it very strange that Samsung and LG are still struggling to stand out technology and not going with the mainstream. That seems to be changing. Samsung is moving away from its software partners, at least it certainly seems that way and marketing its own platform and LG WebOS now has a standalone player, a WebOS player, as opposed to you having to buy their display so that they've got some flexibility there. So I think the big guys are seeing the need to either adjust or just decide, you know what, yes, we have partners, but we are going to do our own thing as well. Gil Matzliah: We believe in Android, but we still believe that we would need to be hardware and OS agnostic. Partner and end user demands, have they changed through the years? Like what they wanted when you got into it or maybe even five years ago, is that different from now? Gil Matzliah: That's an interesting question. I don't notice a big change in the partners. But one thing is for sure, customers, partners, they want everything all the time, so we need to be there to deliver it for them. The impression I get generally is both for the AV/IT ecosystem and particularly on the end user side, they understand the technology a lot more, they understand the benefits and so on. So you're no longer having to put stuff up on a website or elsewhere saying what is digital signage and here's the reasons you want to use it and so on. They get it, they understand it, perhaps they've used it, and now they're looking for their second generation of software because the first selection did the job, but didn't really do what they wanted or limited their capabilities. Are you seeing that? Gil Matzliah: Yes. I think the world is more familiar with digital signage. When we started 12 years ago, not many people would knew what it was, what you do with it, how you install it. And today, every new project of signage is an integral, internal mass part in all these new setup locations, public places, and when more and more people are dealing with that, then they have more knowledge about it and then they start to learn more, to ask for more and this is something we do see. Are there particular vertical markets that you're seeing a lot of growth in and that you guys are focused on? Gil Matzliah: I can tell you about the geographical region. So most of our business, more than half of our business is coming from the United States, which is the easiest market to work with. The faster trying thing, understanding thing. Then we have the European market with a quarter of our business coming from there and they're more conservatives, what they're getting, how they're getting, planning, trying and so on. And then, we have the rest of the world and we are focusing and growing in the last five years in Japan. We have a local team over there in Japan and in Japan they are testing more, asking more. If you deliver and if you have a lot of patience, then it grows. So these are the regions that we work with. As for the different sectors, we really don't have anything which is like more than 20 percent of our business. We do have hospitality, we do have health care, we have the cooperation, we do have retail. But we started a new initiative, which we spoke about in the past a little bit. We established with some partners a company named which is focusing on the retail industry. So everything which is fanning out from retail. Today, we are moving to this new initiative that we built and generally the sectors. Are you mainly selling through a “channel” or do you sell direct? Gil Matzliah: We are acting both direct and on the channels and both of them are significant for us. So, there isn't one which is more or less significant than the other. A lot of our partners are white labels. There are so many installations around the world, which are based on the NoviSign signage that you won't even know. Which I assume is very important to these partners. Gil Matzliah: Yes, because for years, these partners have had their their software, their brand and our support behind it and we give them like instances and so on. We give them confidentiality, of course, if an end user will turn anything upside down and look and research, after some time they'll find us, but it's working fine for our partners and for us. Are your partners layering on managed services so they're white labeling and then saying, we can run this network for you or at least keep an eye on it? Gil Matzliah: Yeah. So when we're working with a local partner, and we have more than 200 of them all around the world. The nice thing is that, if a customer is calling us and say, I want to install this hotel, this hospital, this restaurant, this city hall, we'll tell him the first thing, we are a software company. We are SaaS, it's a do it yourself, we can support you over the phone.But if you want installation, if you want hardware, if you want initial setup, if you don't have the right people in your organization, then we can refer you to one of our partners. Our partners, they are integrators. They know how to build the right hardware, how to configure our software, and how to set it up for the customers, and they do it because they know it much better than us. So, if a customer just wants to get the SaaS subscriptions and they're going to do it themselves, then your partners aren't going to really see anything out of that anyways. They're looking for the services and the hardware integration, all that stuff, so they're not too fussed if you go directly on that but if there's an opportunity to layer in things, then you throw it to your partners. Gil Matzliah: Yes, because we are not going to do meetings with our customers. We are not flying to customers. We are not driving to customers. We do everything software, everything from remote. As long as you need a meeting then it's not going to be sent anywhere. Are there, “whale accounts”, big reference accounts or they could even be small ones that you, when you get asked about who you're working with that you're able to talk about? Gil Matzliah: One of our biggest accounts is Worten in Portugal, which is like Best Buy, that has more than 10,000 endpoints with us and we do have some other big corporations and hotels with us as well. In Israel, I can tell you some names like Ikea, Coca Cola, most of the hotels that are working with us here and many other big brands. In that Portuguese big box electronic store, what are they doing in there? Is it strictly just big displays or are they doing interactive? Gil Matzliah: It's more like a display of things, but they have a lot of initiative, they're very innovative and for more than five years, we work with them and they are always one step ahead of the market, whether it's very nice gates and video walls and presentation layers and everything related to products. In a way, when you go to the Worten store, it will dress the entire store with a special occasion, holiday, festival and the promotion that they do. I'm curious about how your company is using AI. You come from a part of the world that has, pretty serious number of technical people, and some of the AI companies have come out of Israel. Are you applying it or are you looking at it as something you can use? Gil Matzliah: We know and believe that AI will be a part of digital signage. We know it's important. We know it's just the beginning of it now, so the value you can create with it, it's not big yet, but we know it's coming. So, at this phase, we didn't release anything or expose anything, but our technology team is looking at that and trying to do a few things. We might present something in ISE, which is coming at the beginning of next year. And would you use it for… I moderated a panel the other night in New York about all this and I said the presentation layer of using AI for generated visuals and so on, is interesting, but to me, the truly interesting stuff is back of house automating routine tasks and creating marketing materials without a whole bunch of work involved, and one of the guys ran a media company was talking about data input and harmonizing data and all that sort of thing. So somebody looking at this from afar, they might think that's pretty boring, but it can be pretty valuable. Gil Matzliah: We are less looking on the operation side, as AI will help us see the operation side of the signage. We're more looking at the content creation for the signage itself, for the inputs. What about on the technology side? There's endless buzz about LED displays and new emerging display technologies on the display and the playback hardware side. Are there things emerging that you think are going to be important? Gil Matzliah: We don't go into the display technology, the LED technology for us. It's more agnostic. So as long as it can get a resolution of a screen.. It's an output. Gil Matzliah: The one that you get as an input or an output is the way you look at it. What about on media players and just computing power? Gil Matzliah: Yeah, the media player is the important stuff And the main question we all the time ask ourselves is, Is the world moving to a system on chip? Would it stay on the media players? Would it be a combination of them? Would the resolutions and the quality grow performance? And this is something we invest a lot of effort, thinking and development, especially working with all these different platforms which is a lot of maintenance to do. Yeah, I think one of the interesting things and I'm racking my brain trying to remember who, but the idea of system on chip, but with an upgrade pass, so you could pop open a smart display and put in a new SOC three years out that has more graphics processing or some other capability that maybe that didn't have when you first bought it. Gil Matzliah: That's an interesting direction. Alright. So if people want to know more about your company, where would they find you online? Gil Matzliah: You can look for NoviSign.com. All the information is there, the phone numbers, they can contact us, and we are looking for new partners all the time, that will work with us, innovate with us and take our software to maximum customers and locations. And also, if you're an end customer and you want to learn more, you want us to support you with innovative technology and especially software, we'd be happy to have you visit at NoviSign.com. Alright, Gil. Thank you. I hope things calm down there and when I see you at ISE in a few weeks or a couple months. Gil Matzliah: Actually, we're planning to be in MEDICA in Germany next month and then in Las Vegas and then ISE in Barcelona. So wherever you're coming, I will always be happy to see you. Las Vegas and Barcelona, I'll be there. Gil Matzliah: Oh yeah. You have a mixer at both places. Me and my colleagues are looking forward to them. All right. Stay safe and I'll see you soon. Gil Matzliah: Thank you very much.

George Clopp, Korbyt

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 18, 2023 31:09

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT What if you could use AI to make digital signage screen content relentlessly relevant? That's the premise and promise of what Korbyt calls Machine Learning Broadcast, new capabilities in the Dallas-based software firm's CMS platform. Using computer vision and machine learning, the idea is that if the platform can get a sense of what's making people stop and watch in a defined environment, then content can be optimized based on that interest. The system finds and schedules content to push to screens based on engagement metrics. How it all technically works is a bit over my shiny head, but I had a good chat with Korbyt CTO George Clopp about what's going on and its implications. We also get into what the future looks like for AI in digital signage. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Geroge, thank you for joining me. We've chatted in the past. For those who don't know Korbyt, can you give me a rundown of what the company's all about? George Clopp: Hi, Dave. It's a pleasure to speak with you again. Yeah, Korbyt is at its root an employee engagement company. So we've got roots in digital signage, but our typical use case is using digital signage at corporate campuses and to communicate to employees, to increase employee engagement as well as to communicate real-time mission-critical stats as well. Is that pretty much the core vertical that you guys chase, workplace? George Clopp: It is. We are heavily into the workplace, meeting rooms as well. We do a lot with retail banks, a little bit into the retail space, but it's primarily corporate campuses. For those who don't know the company, it actually goes back a long way to Symon Communications days, right? You guys were doing workplace communications long before the digital signage industry discovered that. George Clopp: Yeah, exactly right, Dave. It precedes me. I've been here for seven years now. I can't even believe it, but that's how much I enjoy this space and the industry. I enjoy the company so much, but we had Target Vision, Symon Communications, and we've just evolved. I joined at the tail end of 2016 to develop the Korbyt platform, and obviously, we have to meet the needs of the digital signage industry, but we've had a really heavy focus on employee engagement as well. Is it interesting to see all these other companies who have more general offers, find their way into the workplace because they see that as an opportune vertical? George Clopp: Yeah, I view it as exciting. I think it's definitely a macroeconomic trend with the pandemic, post-pandemic, the modern workplace, everything is reimagining and reinventing and re-everything these days. I think it's good. It's a legitimate macro problem that everyone's looking to provide solutions to. So, I'm really excited. I love the industry myself. In some respects, you guys have been doing back-of-house, a lot longer than most companies would have. I mean, you're not just working in the offices, you're working in production areas and so on. George Clopp: That's correct. Heavy in manufacturing and heavy in the contact centers, anytime where you're doing mission-critical real-time data, you're connecting to an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), or yard management system, and you want to change or orchestrate the display and the surroundings based on data changing, we've got a deep background in that. Yeah, for contact centers, if I recall, years ago pre-arrival with the company, you were doing low-resolution LED readouts that were just telling people in the contact center about the average wait time on calls and things like that. George Clopp: Exactly, and that's matured over the years and now we're doing that on the desktop and on the mobile device as well. We still have some supply chains and some yard management systems in a warehouse, where we'll do the little blinky boards over the dock doors themselves. We range from the dock doors all the way to your mobile device now. The PR that came out about a new piece of functionality, your marketing talks about a million endpoints, 250 cloud migrations, and 100+ native integrations. A million endpoints, that's like a lot. George Clopp: It is. Yeah, scalability and being able to expand out to touch desktops, normal, typical digital science screens, and mobile endpoints. It's been a real focus on us for the last four or five years. So we're really proud to announce that, and then the back end, like you were talking about those native data integrations, I think that's really what sets us aside from a lot of our competition is making those really hardcore authentications and then that real-time pipe between us and the source systems. I know a lot of other software in our space that we run into, they talk about integrations. A lot of times it's really just a file, they're taking data from a source system. They're putting it into a CSV format or any kind of other format and then they're pulling that in. So that's really where we shine with that real-time data integration. Is that important in terms of a distinction when solutions providers and users are looking at data integration and they see that a CMS says, yeah we do data integration, we can integrate with your platform? It sounds like you're saying there are different tiers of that, and there's real integration and there's just like a baseline. George Clopp: Yeah, exactly. That's the right way to pick up on that day, for sure. When you need to orchestrate and change things in a 911 center or in a manufacturing-type environment and definitely in a contact center, speed is really the key there. So having something on a five-minute loop that's pulling a file, it's just not fast enough. So you need that real-time data, you need that high availability so that something was to break that you've got a backup in place and you can make sure that contact center, that supply chain, that 911 center is rolling smoothly. They're not just getting their data, but they're changing the experience of the data. That's another thing that we do, we pull in stats, but we also augment those stats and do value-added calculations on the stats, and then we trigger on those values to change the screen, or change the mobile device or change the desktop. So if you've got too many calls in the queue or you're running behind on this loading dock here, we'll change the entire experience for you based on that value-added stat that we do. I also assume that when companies talk about integrations, for very logical reasons, they're going to go to the most used platforms out there, whether it's Teams or God knows what. But if you have a hundred plus native integrations you're probably talking about some pretty exotic things that nobody's ever heard of, and if a company went in and said, we can integrate with their systems and they say, what those systems are, their eyebrows are going up, because they're thinking, I have never heard of that. George Clopp: Absolutely, Dave. There are some low-level protocols where we just integrate at a TCP level with a very proprietary protocol, but I would say the bulk of it is more modern, JSON-based RESTful interfaces, for sure and we like to distinguish between data integrations, business application integrations, and SSO integrations, in three categories there. So, like a Power BI or a Tableau or something like that would be more of a business application integration, and when we're talking data integration, we're talking more low level, running SQL against a data store, running web services, running SOAP-based web services, and to that extent. And again, that's why we call it out in our marketing because we do think that's a core differentiator for us. So just to go back to something, when you talk about a million endpoints, you're including desktops.. George Clopp: That's correct. Desktops and mobile devices, basically all of the endpoints that we talk to. Good. Back at the start of summer, you guys introduced something called, Machine Learning Broadcast. What is that? George Clopp: Yeah, fantastic question. We were involved with machine learning, and AI before it was really cool, so this was actually something we developed in 2018. We've been honing the model, and then we re-released it this year. But machine learning is a subset of AI, and we all know AI is a super big buzzword these days and when you peel that onion, there's levels of accuracy involved there, and there's a lot of hype around the world. But the reason why we called the feature machine learning broadcast is really to focus on the ML aspects of it, and it's a great business problem to solve because, at the end of the day, what we're really creating is a recommendation engine. And I think everybody's familiar with the Amazon recommendation engine, Instagram, and other social media platforms that are just, they're recommending content for you. That's essentially what we're doing here. We're using KNN Analysis, which is supervised machine learning to look at content that has some engagement with it, and that engagement could be measured by computer vision on a digital signage screen, it could be measured by interactivity with it on a desktop or interactivity with that content on the mobile device and then behind the scenes, all we're doing is we're finding out second, third, fourth-degree order content, that's related to the content that was engaging and then it's a feedback loop. We go ahead and automatically schedule that content and see how that content is engaged with so it's a self-learning feedback loop there and the whole purpose of it is to find content that's engaging and show more of that content to your employees. Could you give me a real-world kind of example of how that might work? George Clopp: Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Let's say a company's opening up a brand new office in Buenos Aires and for whatever reason, people really gravitate to that content. They look at it on the signage screen, on the fifth-floor break room, they're engaging with it on their desktop, they're looking at it on the mobile device. We learn from that engagement and say, okay, let's go ahead and find similar related content there. Let's find content related to office openings in Buenos Aires, and then let's go ahead and go further out and look at second, third-order tags. So that would be content related to South America as well. And then we automatically play that content, inject it back into the playlist, and our customers have complete control over whether it's automatic and which players actually get this content and which devices get it and then, we learn based on that content. So it's a feedback loop, and you might find in that case that your employees are really more interested in the geographic region than they are in the new office opening. So it's relentlessly relevant. George Clopp: Exactly right, Dave, and solving a real-world business problem because one of the challenges our customers have is, it's really arduous to constantly schedule new relevant content. The first couple of times you do it, you create a scheduled playlist. Yeah, it's okay, but it takes a long time and then, with Attention Deficit Disorder in today's modern world, people grow immune, and they tune out that same content over and over again. So, you need that fresh content injected to keep the employee's attention. I'm guessing that somebody's going to be listening to this and thinking, that's cool, but where on earth do I get, or how do I develop all this content so that I do have this somewhat bottomless hyper-relevant content available? George Clopp: Yeah, fantastic question. Right now, in its current stance with our ML broadcast, you need to have that content in your media library. We're not automatically going out to like copyright-free areas and pulling in content. But with our release coming out next year, it's called our AI employee engagement. With that, we'll automatically be creating and sourcing content for you on your behalf. Yeah, I saw a demo of something like that over in Germany a little while back with another company who, I'm sure you'll be happy if I don't name them, that was all about using what was available through an intranet and an extranet, and other resources to auto-generate content for screens. George Clopp: Yeah, it's opening up the whole world of generative AI. We're actually looking at both. Whether there are generative images, generative video, or generative text. Obviously, in our space, images and videos mean a lot, and there are different systems out there. There's DALI 2, there's stable diffusion. They've all got their strengths and their weaknesses. But we're combining that with templated-based content as well. So automatically generating content that's relevant based off of a text prompt is super useful. But in some cases, it might not be the right content that's generated. So we also will have a mixture of templated content as well. Yeah, I think templates are a big part of that. I've farted around with things like Mid Journey and so on, and you could see how it could go sideways on you really quickly if you left too much up to the machine. George Clopp: Exactly. It gets into that whole thing of prompt engineering. You got to be really good with your prompts, and they've all got issues like generating hands and things of that nature right now. But we want to be on the leading edge of this, use it where it makes sense. An area where we think it really makes a lot of sense, a preview into our AI Employee Engagement, is on mission values and goals. We feel like that's an area where our customers just don't communicate enough to their employees, like, there's cake in the break room, let's recognize employees. That's all part of it, but really just reinforcing, Hey, your goal in the finance department this week is to close your books three days earlier. And so, mix that text in with some great video or some great images that are created in the background using this generative AI. Yeah, I saw something on LinkedIn last night, and I commented on it because I thought it is great that there's a company that's using KPIs and messaging right on the production floor, and the person who posted about it said, this is not very sexy, but it goes to what's needed on the floor for those workers. But the problem was, it looked like hell. It was just black and white, and they were slapping up a whole bunch of Excel charts, like a stock of them and you'd need binoculars to even see them. So it's important to think about the presentation. George Clopp: Yeah, totally agree, Dave. I say this at all my speaking events: content is king, content is queen, and that still rules the day. When we're intermixing real-time data with content, it has to be visually appealing. You can't have 20 different stats on the screen; all of those rules of graphic design, I still think, hold true here. Do you see a day when things like scheduling and trafficking of content are largely automated and handed off to machine learning or some variant of AI? George Clopp: That's exactly what we're trying to build, Dave, with a release next year. With the ability, of course, to intervene, the ability for the communicator to come in and approve the content or really go ahead and bias the content and say, okay, I've got these 30 categories of content I see that I really want to bias, what the content areas could be. “Hey, I'm a new enroll. I'm a new first-time line manager. I'm a new director. I'm a new VP, and there's content associated with that new enroll.” They might want to bias that and increase the weight on it, decrease the weight on it, or take it out altogether. So there's still going to be that human touch involved in the ability to approve content, but the AI itself will take care of making sure that content is fresh and relevant. And the big problem we're solving there is just that, again, attention deficit disorder people have, if they see the same thing on the screen, week after week, they tend to tune out. So how can we think of innovative ways to display KPIs, display goals, display things that are really important to the company and give it a great background, give it a great video so that it gets employees' attention again? We're going to talk about machine learning. You reference AI-driven camera optics. Is that basically a computer vision? George Clopp: It is. Absolutely is, yes. Did you guys write your own, or are you using something like Intel's OpenVINO? George Clopp: Yeah, the two big ones out there, we've used OpenCV, that is, Open Computer Vision, and TensorFlow, and they both have their strengths and weaknesses, but there are higher order problems we're trying to solve here, and not reinvent computer vision so we're using some libraries for that. Is that just part of the mix of doing this sort of thing? Are there other technologies you can use to get a sense of dynamics in a venue? George Clopp: Yeah, I think so. Infrared detectors, pressure sensors that kind of tell you who's in that immediate vicinity. You're basically correlating that to human beings in the vicinity, how many human beings are there, and what was playing on the screen at that time. Yeah, so there are less technological ways to do this and still get some good results. AI is being talked about a lot as you've gone through about its potential to automate presentations. Are there other aspects to a digital signage company, the way your company operates, that you can use AI to help with marketing, help with customer contact, that sort of thing? George Clopp: Yeah, without a doubt. I'm sure you're reading everything. It's revolutionizing all traditional roles, right? Not just engineers writing code. You got a chat with a ChatGPT engineer. With Microsoft's Copilot, it's going to revolutionize the way we all use Excel and Word and PowerPoint and things of that nature. It's definitely revolutionizing marketing. Building product brochures for you automatically, things of that nature, and then, that naturally progresses into, is AI going to take all of our jobs, which I don't think so, going to help us all become more productive. The employees that really change and adopt the AI, I think they're going to be even more valuable than they are today. It's just the employees that just say, I'm not going to do this, and they refuse to allow their cheese to be moved, those are the ones that I think you have to watch out for. There's an increasing number of companies. I just wrote about one today that has gone down the path of headless CMS. The idea that you can leave the final presentation later, the interactive element, whatever it is to software developers at a large company or who works with a large company as a services company and the digital signage CMS is just the infrastructure, the foundational platform that does device management, scheduling, trafficking, all that sort of stuff. Are you seeing that demand in the marketplace? George Clopp: We're seeing the opposite. What you're saying absolutely makes sense, especially with my background and the way we've architected our product with microservices. What we're seeing, especially with our large enterprise customers is, they want a little more white glove service. Taking on the arduous task of piecing everything together, even with a microservices framework, is putting a lot of ownership on them. But that is not to say that there's not a need out there. We just really haven't found it. We've actually gone the opposite direction on our side, which has really served us well because we've gone from zero revenue in the cloud to 2 million. We brought on a new CEO, and we quickly ramped up to 20 million. I think it's working for us so far. Yeah, you're a very different company than maybe prior to you joining RMG Networks, that was a weird little side trip into digital out of home. George Clopp: It was. We see the artifacts and all that, but I think it's a great group of people here now. There's not a leftover where people have bad attitudes or anything like that. So really proud of where the company's been, the talent we've acquired. We've acquired people from all over the industry. Really love working with the current team and cross-functionally, not just engineering and support, which is what I run, but in sales and marketing as well. Yeah, it's interesting when you mentioned you've gone in the opposite direction of headless. I've heard that as well, particularly when you get into, like Fortune 500, Fortune 100 kinds of enterprise-grade customers. They want to outsource digital signage, by and large, in the same way that they've outsourced a lot of IT services. George Clopp: Yeah, absolutely. That's the same trend we're seeing, Dave too. It's a little bit of both, right? Everybody wants their cake and eats it too, right? Like they want you to have the ability to do it, but then when it comes time to actually execute on it, we typically find, Hey, we can help them get faster to market if we help augment their team. How important is security? George Clopp: Oh! It's Huge. We all know that the disaster scenario in digital signage, someone compromises your network and they put up some content images or videos that are not appropriate. Even more so with us being more omni-channel with desktop, mobile devices. We've got a data privacy officer, we're SOC 2 compliant. We do a lot of work in Europe so GDPR comes up a lot as well, data privacy. So I think it's super important. When I think you look at the different offerings out there and the first tier, we look and sound the same. So I think what you got to do with new prospects or new customers, they just got to peel that onion more. What does that really mean? What does it mean that you encrypt your data? Do you do it at rest? Do you do it in transit? Those kinds of things, and I think that's where you can tell the difference between different offerings. And are the people in the first and second meetings with prospective customers different than they were 7 years ago when you started? I'm hearing the IT people who used to come to meetings and sit there with their arms crossed, thinking, dear God, how long is this going to go on? They're now tending to lead these meetings. George Clopp: Yeah, I've seen it in multiple ways. Definitely, IT is still the big persona of the buyer here. But I'm also seeing less and less about speeds and feeds and players and hardware and transmission equipment and scalers and more about the final purpose of what we're trying to do. I'm just starting to see that shift. Seven years ago, I talked to people, and it's the AV integration guy. I don't really care what's on the screen. I just care that it's not dark. I don't want a screen that's down. That's their most important thing, and now I'm seeing that shift a little bit more towards they do care about the content, and they're bringing in more of the HR and the communications group involved and making sure that the platform can grow. I can create content on the platform or I can integrate with Adobe or SharePoint or something along those lines. But I still see it, especially AV/IT as a huge influence in the buying process. Yeah, certainly going back seven, eight years when I was doing some one-to-one consulting with enterprise level customers, that sort of thing, I would go into a first meeting, and I would say, okay, why do you want to do this? And it was always intriguing to see how often people would lean back in their chairs and say, I hadn't really thought about that. They wanted this thing, but as you say, they didn't really know what they were going to do with this thing. George Clopp: Yeah, exactly. And there's a little bit of power in that too. There's power to putting the latest and greatest screen technology in your office and giving you that modern technology look and feel but then just carry it one more step in the maturity direction and start focusing on the content too. Yeah, you can demonstrate innovation by having a big ass screen in your lobby, but if there's nothing useful on there, you're not really demonstrating a lot of innovation. George Clopp: Exactly, and I think there's still room for that super wonderful creative experience that's human-curated that graphic designers make, and they spend a lot of time getting just perfect in those high profile areas, like the lobby of a company, and then there's also opportunity for, new content generation automatically for me so that I don't have to necessarily sit here and handle this thing. So I think we're going to live in a world where both will be applicable. So you mentioned you, you're working on new iterations of AI-driven content. Is that the big kind of roadmap item for your company over the next year? George Clopp: Yes, it really is. Yeah. We've got a huge, large-player ecosystem, all the data integrations, and omni-channel platforms. So where our new development team is focused on is automating the content creation, automating that entire feed, if you will, so that it really takes that arduous process away from our communicator. How many folks do you have in the company now? George Clopp: We're a little under 70 people right now. So still a small company and I love it cause everybody has to wear multiple hats, do multiple roles. You have to bring a lot of energy to the company, and I just love that. I've just grown so fond of it over the last seven years. And is most of the team in the Dallas Fort Worth area, or are you all over the place? George Clopp: Since COVID, we're mainly in Dallas, but since COVID, a lot of us have moved out a little bit. So I'm actually in Colorado. Some of my engineering leads are in the West Coast, some are in Pennsylvania. So we're really practicing what we preach, the hybrid workforce. All right, George, thank you for spending some time with me. It was good to catch up. George Clopp: Yeah, it's fantastic, Dave. Thank you so much for taking time out.

Andrew Gould, Ditto (Squirrels)

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 12, 2023 37:21

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT A lot of technology companies have bolted digital signage capabilities on to their core software platform. Often, that means the end-products don't do a whole lot beyond playing out some files on a screen. I'm a bit guilty of making that assumption about Ditto, a wireless screen sharing platform that also works as a digital signage CMS. In chatting with the company that develops and markets Ditto, and now in this podcast with co-founder Andrew Gould, I've learned Ditto is much more than an add-on. Some customers get Ditto licenses for the signage functions, and then don't even use the screen mirroring. Based in Ohio, the company spent its first dozen or so years selling screen sharing into the education and workplace verticals. But it started getting a lot of requests from end-users about adding functionality that made screens useful during downtimes. They wanted to get more bang from their hardware buck. So the parent company, Squirrels, spun up the digital signage component in 2020, and Ditto is now a tandem offer. Gould concedes there are maybe some things a pure-play, enterprise-grade digital signage CMS can offer that Ditto can't, but there's an awfully big user base out there that's never going to need or use a lot of those more exotic and elaborate functions. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Andrew, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of the company? Is it Squirrels, the company, or is Ditto the company or is Ditto the product? Andrew Gould: Ditto is the product. Squirrels is the company. We founded the company in 2008, and we've been mainly focused on wireless collaboration in classrooms, and huddle spaces in higher education and then, in 2020, we expanded our Ditto offering to include digital signage and emergency alerts, which is something a lot of our K-12 customers were requesting. So when you started the company back in 2008, was digital signage on the roadmap way back then, or is it purely one of these situations where you had the K12 people asking you about it and eventually realized okay, we should do this? Andrew Gould: Yeah, it was a situation where we were focused on the collaboration, and then in the feedback channels we had with the customers, they started asking or suggesting, It'd be really great if we could show things when we really weren't showing things. When the teachers weren't mirroring their screens and sharing things, it'd be nice if we could say, here's what today's homework is, or here's what's going on at the school or for higher ed, here's upcoming events, things like that. So we saw it as a natural evolution of, “We're already on that screen. It makes sense to allow users to utilize that screen when it's not being used for the primary function of collaboration.” That primary function, could you walk through how that would work in a typical scenario? Andrew Gould: Yeah, so we have an application that runs on a device connected to the screen or TV in the front of a room. Be it a projector, a flat screen, doesn't really matter. It runs on Apple TVs as well as Windows devices so there's some flexibility there of whatever device they wanna have connected to that main screen. There's just a piece of software called Ditto Receiver and that handles all of the functionality of showing what's being shared by students and teachers in the classroom. It handles displaying the digital signage and it also handles displaying critical emergency alerts, if they're fired and all of those things connect back to the cloud. The IT staff manages that from a central cloud portal, and then it periodically checks for updated settings, digital signage, configurations, et cetera, pulls those down, and caches them locally, so if you do have a little blip in the network or the internet goes down temporarily that functionality can continue to run even if it's not connected to the internet for a moment. So, in essence, whether it's a teacher or a student or in a working environment, whether it's the person leading the meeting or somebody who's a participant, they could pull up their phone, their tablet, whatever it may be, and if they have the Ditto app, they can push their screen to the main screen in that room? Andrew Gould: Exactly, and our big focus with the collaboration part of Ditto is that device agnostic approach. So we want any kind of device that's coming into a space to be able to share, not just if you have an Apple device, it'll work to this Apple TV, or if you have a Google device that'll work to this Chromecast. We really push hard to make sure that each device that comes in, whether it's from a browser or from a native app on a platform, can connect and quickly share. And that's important in a number of ways. A, it doesn't slow down the meeting, but it removes a lot of IT support and AV/IT support within an organization, whether it's a school or a business. Because I've been in those meetings where somebody says here, I'll just share my screen, and then 15 minutes later, it's still being sorted out. Andrew Gould: Yes, and we've all gone into those rooms that have the laminated sheet of instructions of, “If you're using this device, it's these seven steps, and if you're using this device, you have to be on this network. Then you have to do these three steps, et cetera, et cetera.” All of that goes away with Ditto which means far fewer support calls for the IT staff, and just a more pleasant experience is that we have people come into our offices, accountants, lawyers, just general non-technical people, and they're blown away at how easy and fast it is to get their content up on the screen, which is all anybody wants. We don't care about how fast or how crisp it is or how cool it looks once it's up there if it takes you 10 minutes to get it connected. So quick, fast, easy is always our guiding light as we mature the product and move it along. On the digital signage side of this, the way it's marketed from what I can see is, it's a tandem product, as opposed to, we are a collaboration product that, oh, by the way, we can also do this. You seem to be saying, “It's a full-fledged product on its own. If you wanted, you could just use it for digital signage.” Is that a fair statement? Andrew Gould: Oh yeah, for sure. We have customers that turn off the mirroring capabilities and they just use it for digital signage. Menus in the fast dining have TVs over the counter where people order. We have customers that are just using it for that, that don't even care about what the original purpose of Ditto was, which was the screen mirroring stuff, and then we have customers that only use it for screen mirroring and we haven't got them up and running on digital signage ye. They haven't realized what the value add is. But there are more customers doing both. They are mirroring, and then when it's not mirroring, they are showing important information to the users. Whether it's connection information, things going on at the organization, stocks, or just the kind of stuff to keep it feeling more fresh, utilizing those screens. But yeah, it's definitely a product that can just be utilized as a standalone digital signage solution. I'm guessing that you and particularly your customer-facing folks fight a perception problem in that there are other products out in the marketplace that were started as one thing and added digital signage on, and generally speaking, the perception I have and the feedback I've somewhat heard is that, “Yeah, it can do digital signage too, but we're not talking about robust digital signage. We're talking like we can run a set of files on a screen in an order and that's about where it begins and ends.” Andrew Gould: We are not an industry-leading digital signage solution when it comes to features. There are incumbents that are far more feature-heavy than we are, but what we've tried to focus on are the things that the customers truly need to have a good digital signage experience. So it's being able to create signage lists, as we call them, which are basically playlists of media, ease of use of setting all of that up in the configuration portal, so that it doesn't feel like an add-on or a thing etucked into a corner. A lot of time and energy is spent on the part that actually the end user never sees, which is configuration managing of all the media files and also providing templates for people who don't want to or don't have the resources to create their own digital signage assets. Providing some really easy turnkey solutions as well to say, hey, if you just need to get some basic information shown and you don't want to have to pay a designer or something like that to create something, here are some really cool templates that we've put together for you and they're just WYSIWYG, change this line, change the subject, change the body, upload an image, add a video, and you're ready to go with really nice looking digital signage. So I wouldn't say we are innovating digital signage by any means, but we're trying to create a package that doesn't feel like we just bolted something onto the side of it. That really feels like a first-class digital signage solution. In a lot of cases, while there are certainly feature-rich software options out there, I suspect a hell of a lot of end users don't ever use more than 15% of what's available to them with those platforms. Andrew Gould: Yeah, absolutely. We poll our users frequently about, “Hey, what do you like about the product? What don't you like about the product?” That's the most important part. We wanna make that better, and we ask, “Hey, here's a whole list of different things. How much would you use this?” The feedback nears that there is 10-15% of features we don't have that people say they might use, and most of the people say that they probably would never use synchronized digital signage across eight different screens or things that kind of fall into the more high-end solutions for digital signage. They just want ease of use, things that look nice and reliable. Those are what they care about the most. Yeah. So if somebody comes to you and says, “We're putting a huge LED video wall in the lobby. Can you drive that?” You might say, I suppose we could maybe do that, but that's not what we're here for. Andrew Gould: We've certainly had those requests and we've said, “Hey, here's how you would do that if you are ready to do it. But, to be honest, there are better solutions for that problem.” Digital signage is not a one-size-fits-all problem. There is very high-end hardware that drives large billboards and there's our end where we're just trying to drive it on a 70'' screen in a room. So we don't have to solve everyone's problems. We're fine saying, that sounds really cool. We wished Ditto was designed to do things like that. You might be better served with something that's from the ground up built to power stuff like that. You can stay in your lane, and it's a pretty decent-sized lane. Andrew Gould: Correct. Yeah, it's a huge market. So there's plenty of room for lots of people to all be swimming, doing different things, and not really stepping on each other. One of the problems I find with some entry-level, and I'm not saying yours is, but just in broad strokes, entry-level platforms don't have much in the way if they have anything at all in terms of device management, and I gather that your device management is done through third-party device management modules, like the Jamf and so on. Andrew Gould: Yeah. So early on, we explored building Ditto with MDM capabilities. But what we experienced in talking with our customers is that most of them already had a solution to do those sorts of things. So we would have to convince them to switch to our device management platform and 90% of what MDM does has nothing to do with what we would need to do with it. So we'd be building out this whole lump on the side of Ditto just to be able to replicate the service they were already using so they would switch to ours. So we ultimately looked at that and said, this isn't the right fit for us, rather than trying to fight upstream and convince all of these customers that already have solutions to switch to ours. Let's just partner with all of these solutions and make it work really well. So we've partnered with the various Apple TV MDM vendors to make it really turnkey to mass deploy Ditto to hundreds of Apple TVs with literally just pushing a couple of buttons. So that's been our approach to it and that seems to be what the customer's like with us. Yeah, if they're already using it, why would they go to something that's just dedicated to your application? Andrew Gould: No matter what I do, I will always be inferior to a Jamf. They're a huge publicly traded company focused solely on MDM. I'm never gonna make an MDM as good as theirs, so why try? What is your footprint, and what would you say are your core vertical markets? Andrew Gould: The core vertical markets definitely K-12 and higher education in the United States. We have a footprint all around the world. We're in Europe, Asia, Australia, South America. We have a lot of business users as well, whether that's in office space or co-working spaces have been a big business for us lately, as people are working from home but wanna get out of the house occasionally and go somewhere else. Those office spaces are looking for easy mirroring as people come in and out. But we're really focused on the K-12 and higher education market because this solution just fits so nicely into that environment. It works great in business. It works great in fast casual dining and all these other places that people use Ditto. But what's cool about Ditto is that it is so universal as a tool. It can plug in all kinds of places. We have churches that use it to show the lyrics to songs as people are singing along. There are all kinds of really interesting applications that we set out to get into flexible and adaptable tools and put into a lot of interesting environments. When it comes to education, how is it being used in classrooms? Andrew Gould: So you've typically got it running on the screen at the front of the room, whether that's an interactive whiteboard or just a TV mounted on the wall or projector, whatever. It's usually connected to that, and then primarily, the teacher is using it to push her screen from a laptop device up to the screen, and then we can support up to four devices sharing at the same time. So then students will connect and we have an add-on application for Windows and iOS where the teacher can manage who's allowed to be sharing. She can approve or deny connections to hide somebody if she wants to emphasize on her screen and not the other students who are connected to that. Then typically, when nothing is being shared, there's digital signage that's usually managed at the school level, but we do have some schools that allow the teachers to set up their own digital signage per classroom. So you're seeing that digital signage there and then it's spilling out into the hallways. They're putting TVs into hallways of even K-12 schools, higher ed common areas. They're running mainly just digital signage in those areas versus the hybrids that they're running in the classrooms. Are school districts mostly using Apple TVs? Andrew Gould: It's about two-thirds Apple TVs and one-third Windows devices, that's how our users break down. So it's not quite 50-50. I think it's trending more towards that 50-50 blend. Early on, it was very Apple TV heavy, and we're seeing a bit more of a skewback towards Windows devices. I'm not sure exactly what's behind that trend, maybe it's the drive down of cheaper and cheaper Windows devices that can actually run 4k video and kind of stuff, the nooks, and the likes But yeah. So right now, the blend is really two-thirds Apple TVs. What about collaboration displays that have systems on chips embedded in them, can you work with those? Andrew Gould: So we've looked at the Android TVs and Samsung's OS and those sorts of things. The feedback that we've got from customers is that they are not really interested in that capability. The limitation of that is usually given the horsepower on those devices; we can usually only show one or two screens at a time. It ends up making Ditto, a hobbled product for it, and most of the time when people come to us, they've already got Apple TVs purchased or they've got a Windows device, they're already looking to use, and they're coming from the, “I picked my device, now I'm looking for the solution” approach, and the Smart TVs don't come up in the conversations that much. We're not opposed to it. If that's the way the market wants to go, we can surely adapt to that. All our technology is really flexible, so it's quick for us to repurpose a new platform, but just not what the customers are asking these days. Yeah, and it's not like an Apple TV is expensive. Andrew Gould: It's $150, and it'll run for probably 10 years before you have to worry about replacing it. They're really rock solid. When you're selling into K12 in particular, are you selling district-wide or do you have to sell down to the school level? Andrew Gould: It's typically district-wide. It's usually the IT coordinator or applicable semi-related role there that's looking to roll out an agnostic solution, and that's another place where we really shine is that schools are not one-to-one all the same type of device. You're typically seeing iPads in the lower grades, and then you're seeing Windows surfaces or Chromebooks as you get more into typing and writing papers and those sorts of things. So they want one solution that's going to work across the board for all of those things, and that's what Ditto's bread and butter is. So that starts the conversation off right away: one solution, you're supporting one product across, whether you have three schools or a hundred schools in the district, it's all the same solution, and then we can start the conversations if you realize digital signage, you've got all these screens in the cafeteria or the hallways, how are you putting information up there? And a lot of times it's, oh, there's a USB drive, and we go around and collect them, and we update them once a month. Somebody's job is to update the USB with the media and plug it back into all the TVs, and there is a much better way to do that. With a lot of schools using Chrome devices, is that problematic at all, or does it work with your system just fine? Andrew Gould: No, it works great with Chrome. So Chrome OS used to have applications; they called them Chrome Apps. So we originally had a Chrome app that did all of this. That was in the store. And then Google wound down Chrome apps just because they weren't really being utilized all that much on the platform. So we went to a pure browser experience. So you just go to our goditto.com website, and you enter the room code that's being shown on the teacher screen, and then we just use the web RTC built-in technology to capture the screen and send it over to Ditto receiver and show it so you can actually share without installing anything on a device, and that works on all platforms that support the browser capture technology. There are other options out there for certainly higher ed. You've got companies like Rise Vision that's particularly strong in K to 12 in churches and things like that, and some others How do I describe them, CMS software companies that are focused on that market, and then you've got the companies like Zoom that have video collaboration that have added on some digital signage capabilities and the Air Teams, where people who do similar screen mirroring. How do you match up against them and how do you sell against them? Andrew Gould: Yeah, so the Air Team and Immersive, they're selling proprietary hardware with a subscription service on top of it. So if you're looking for, “Hey, just give me a turnkey solution, give me everything. I'm not really worried about the price, I just want it to work.” Those are great solutions. But what we see in schools is they care very much about the cost and the pricing, and some of them have already made investments into hardware with Apple TVs or Windows devices, and they're saying, look, this is just extra cost that I don't need to do the same thing. So how we position against those is just, “Hey, you can use whatever hardware you want. We're happy to run on either of those platforms and if you've already got them, cool, just buy our subscription, and you're ready to go. You don't have to worry about buying a five, six or eight hundred dollar hardware device, deploying it, or managing it differently than how you manage other things.” So that's how we match up against those. The more CMS type things that are focused on, digital signage in those very specific things. Again, those are the incumbents, those are the people that have been doing this; some of them have been there for decades doing this type of stuff. So we're not here to try and outcompete those companies. We just see that there are certain niches that maybe those companies don't fill as well, and we're content to come along and fill those in and keep improving our product, and one day, maybe we'll compete with them. Maybe we'll have a platform that we've decided, hey, we should just make it do everything for everybody and look at going after competitors like those. But like I said, the market is big enough that they can have that niche. We can have this niche, and it's a very healthy business for us, and we're happy to keep doing that. There are a couple of things that we know how to do really well versus, maybe, trying to get too big too fast, trying to do everything all at once. Was having the digital signage component added to it pretty important because you've got companies like Google that have Chromecast that costs 35 bucks or something like that, that can do some degree of screen sharing, and it would be people who are really cost conscious, they could just go down that path? Andrew Gould: Yeah, for sure. We don't really see many Chromecast in school-type approaches. For whatever reason, they still don't have basic security like onscreen code or passwords. They've only recently rolled out the ability to remotely manage those types of things. Adding digital signage wasn't really about competing with any particular thing. The customers that we have and the ones that we're trying to get all value this functionality, and we saw it as a natural fit. It wasn't like we had to completely reinvent the product and take it in some radical new direction. It just seemed like a natural complement to what we were already doing and we talked with some customers. We're running two different solutions on an Apple TV, and they were trying to use Ditto for screen mirroring, and they were trying to use a different Apple TV application for digital signage, and they were trying to do crazy MDM scheduling, based on the class schedule, lock this app for Ditto, so it's open, and then when it's time in between class, walk the digital assignment solution, and we said, there people really want it that bad, maybe we can just be all of that in one and not force our customers to have to run two things like that. So that was the natural genesis of it versus we need to protect our position or something like that. It just made it evolutionary to move in a new direction. So, how seamless and intuitive is it? Let's say, it is running in digital signage mode, the screen is, and the teacher decides, I want to push something to the screen from my laptop or my phone or whatever, and launches that session, does its thing. To then go back to digital signage, what's involved? Andrew Gould: You just start sharing your screen and stop sharing your screen. So it's directed from the device that wants to share their screen. So, when you open the app, you enter the room code. We make them fun, easy to enter, like red apples, big pineapple things that are easy, not like random numbers and digits that are hard for kids to type in. And they push ‘Start sharing' and boom, their screen's up there, digital signage fades out, screen sharing fades in. It's an instantaneous switchover, and then as soon as the last person stops sharing their screen, if you've got multiple people connected, it goes right back to the digital signage slide it was on when the person first connected. So it's very easy. There's no mode, nothing you have to tinker with on the screen itself. So the management, whether it's the school, the district, or the individual teacher, they're using a browser to plan out their digital signage side of what the screen's doing? Andrew Gould: Yeah. It's all a cloud-based portal. So you can be in the same building, or you can be in a different state. We have businesses that are deployed with Ditto in offices around the world, and there are a couple of people that sit in California and they manage all the digital signage worldwide. So it's super easy right from the portal. And what's the commercial side of it? What are you paying? Is it a SaaS? Andrew Gould: Yeah, it's a SaaS model. It's a yearly subscription. We offer a monthly if people are using this in bursts, but obviously, you save money by purchasing for an annual versus monthly. And it's per screen that's running Ditto. So the other thing that we allow is, if you have multiple screens in a classroom, obviously, you can show digital signage on those, but we actually allow one device to push their content to multiple screens. So we're seeing, especially in some classrooms, you've maybe got a screen in the front or to the side or behind as they set up classes less like when I was in school where it was just rows, everybody facing the front now that these little pods of kids are sitting at tables and not everybody's facing the same direction, so they've actually got multiple screens in the rooms. So we just charge per screen that runs the software, and that's it. What's the fee? Andrew Gould: So, it's $12.50 per month annually. So it's $125 per month if you're at 10 or more receivers in a school. Is that just for the screen mirroring, or is that for the functionality, including the digital signage? Andrew Gould: Yeah. That's for everything. That's one price for everything. We don't charge more for that. We view it as, “Hey, we took this thing that we charge this price for. It made it even better by giving you all the stuff, and it's the same price.” And that includes the emergency alerts as well. So that ties into a protocol called CAP, which is how the National Weather Service and School Alert Systems all can send alerts. So we have a CAP server capability, where we can receive alerts from other servers, whether it's the National Weather Service, an alert system that, unfortunately, a lot of schools are having to deploy now, where it can push one button and text the parents and send a push notification and send all the alerts out to Ditto and Ditto immediately takes over and shows that alert. You get all of that for that one price. Yeah, it sounds very much like this isn't a constrained compromise limited solution for the K to 12 market, it's gonna do pretty much what an average classroom and what an average school is going to need. Andrew Gould: Yeah, we really tried to put everything in there because, again, we don't want people having to be like, “Well, Ditto almost does everything. It'd be great if it just did this one other thing, and then we wouldn't need this other solution.” The hope is that we can provide that one solution that everybody needs. Tell me more about the company. It's been around since 2008. Is it privately held, or are you listed? Andrew Gould: We're privately held. I'm one of the co-founders of the company, started it back in 2008 with my business partner. When we first started out, we weren't doing collaboration. We were doing iOS app development. We had one of the first 50 apps in the iOS app store. We could actually get to the bottom of the list. It was a TV guide app where you could put in the code and see what was on TV. It sounds like an archaic technology today but it was pretty cool back in the day, and then we got into the collaboration space in about 2012 when we released our first collaboration app, and then we've been focused on collaboration ever since. Where's the company based? Andrew Gould: North Canton, Ohio, about an hour south of Cleveland but we have a diversified team present in a lot of states all around the country, but all the within the United States. Is the majority of your business in the US? Andrew Gould: Yes. That's where mainly our outbound sales are focused on. But, like I said, we have a really big following actually in Australia. A lot of ditto customers there, and we are working on expanding into Europe this year and into next year to really go after that. There's a lot more regulation and requirements, and apps have to work certain ways and those sorts of things that we want to make sure that we're compliant and respectful to those things and come into that market appropriately, but it's a big focus for us because we think the same needs exist there as they do everywhere else. Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of US and Canadian companies think they can just make the jump over, and then they get asked about things like GDPR and they're looking at the other person, “What?” Andrew Gould: Yeah, or even just common things like in France, everything has to be localized into the French language. If you have one string in your application that's in English, they typically won't purchase. They value that. So we want to be respectful to those things, and they're not hard things for us to comply with. It just requires us to pay somebody who knows French to translate a list of strings, and then we can sell into those markets as well. Are you selling direct, or do you have channel partners? Andrew Gould: Mainly direct. We have some channel partners that we started with right before the pandemic, and so we've seen a lot of that market move around, and so some of the channel partners that we originally partnered were more business-focused and the world has changed for business where people just aren't going to the office as much anymore, and those channel partners just didn't make sense. So we're actually working through a sort of reset of that channel partner program to be more education-focused with the channel partners. But we have some really great channel partners in the US that we work with, whether they're distributors or they're resellers, whether they're just purchasing on behalf of the school and passing that through, or taking our solution and bundling it up with, “Hey, here's the screen you need and here's the speakers and the WiFi and everything,” and including us as a full technology rollout. We like to work with both of those. If people want to know more, where do they find you online? Andrew Gould: Our website is goditto.com. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial there. You can set up as many screens as you want, and play with digital signage as much as you want for 30 days, and then, as I said, it starts at $150 per receiver for a single license, and then we have volume pricing above 10 and it scale scales down from there. Great. Thank you very much for spending some time with me. Andrew Gould: Yeah, thanks, Dave. Appreciate it.

Everything You Need To Know About Selling (That No One Told You Yet)

I Want To Know

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 23, 2023 47:30

Today my guest on the I Want To Know podcast is Marcus Manderson. Marcus, also known as @dafingaz, is a music composer and producer who has worked on music for companies including Disney, National Geographic, Smithsonian, MTV, and Fox.He's a former church musician who works in AV IT by day and as a music composer and producer by night. You can find him on social media, mainly Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn @dafingaz, where he shares his latest music and discusses sync licensing, which is about how to get music into movies and tv, movie trailer music, and networking.Here are some of the most valuable moments in our conversation:00:00 - Introduction15:35 - How To Create A Course In 4 Steps (If You Have An Audience)20:44 - I Bet You Don't Sell What You Think You Sell40:18 - 5 Ways To Turn A One-Off Gig Into Repeat BusinessShow Notes

Simple Steps for Securing Employee Buy-In With Alison Bencsik of BAI Electronic Systems Distributors

Distribution Talk

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2023 55:45

Professional vulnerability is a hallmark of outstanding leadership. That said, there's a reason so few leaders possess the characteristic: it's uncomfortable at best; terrifying at worst. Alison Bencsik, CEO of BAI Electronic Systems Distributors, a professional and commercial audio, video, and lighting supplier in Ocala, FL, doesn't know any other way to succeed. She's transformed vulnerability into a superpower, fueling improvements within the company and strengthening relationships across the AV/IT industry. Jason caught up with Alison to discuss her unconventional journey to CEO, her strategy to get more women involved in distribution, and turning unguarded moments into organizational wins. CONNECT WITH JASON LinkedIn CONNECT WITH ALISON LinkedIn *** For full show notes and services visit: https://www.distributionteam.com Distribution Talk is produced by The Distribution Team, a consulting services firm dedicated to helping wholesale distribution clients remove barriers to profitability, generate wealth and achieve personal goals. This episode was edited & mixed by The Creative Impostor Studios. Special thanks to our sponsor for this episode: INxSQL Distribution Software, integrated distribution ERP software designed for the wholesale and distribution industry.

Daily Download Monday June 26, 2023

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 26, 2023 2:18

AVWeek 596: Tim Albright is joined by Willie Franlkin, Kylie Pfile and Patrick Whipkey talking about AV diversity. Willie Franklin starts off talking about supporting groups like the Women in AV/IT to build a stronger and more connected industry.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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S1E301: יעוץ ותכנון בתחומי ה AV והעיצוב – קונפליקט או עוצמה?

אנשים ומחשבים

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 19, 2023 15:14

פרק מיוחד לקראת כנס המולטימדיה AV - TLV ראיון עם אביעד כהן, יועץ AV בקומיט, שותף באיוימאסטר, מנחה הפאנל: אתגרי המשולש בתכנון הקמפוסים וחללי העבודה בעידן של שינוי מתמיד - איך האדריכל, יועץ ה-AV ומחלקת ה-IT יכולים לגשר על הקונפליקטים. מראיינים יהודה קונפורטס עורך ראשי של אנשים ומחשבים ורון קסלר , עורך הפודקסט. להאזנה לפרק נוסף לקראת הכנס לחצו כאן הירשמו עכשיו לכנס מולטימדיה AV - TLV הכנס בחברות דוברים בכירים בתחום שיחשפו פתרונות וטכנולוגיות מולטימדיה מתקדמים, בשילוב של סיפורי לקוח וערכי המוסף למקבלי החלטות ומשתמשים. בכנס תוצג גם תערוכת מולטימדיה "The Multimedia show" לחצו כאן להרשמה לכנס See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Brandon Harp, Electrosonic

death conference av ryan gray av it

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 8, 2023 46:46

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I see an ambitious new visual display project lit up at a new or reno'd airport, office tower or attraction, I just about assume that if it's in the US, the company that put it in is probably Electrosonic. The company is, technically, an AV systems integrator, and there are lots of them out there, of all sizes. But where corporate meeting spaces, control rooms and reception areas are the day-to-day work for most of those companies, the bread and butter work for Electrosonic is in locations where experience is the primary consideration and mindset. The company - which has offices in the US, Europe and Asia - has a ton of experience and expertise in delivering AV and IT jobs that involve more than getting infrastructure in place. They work a lot with creative design and technology shops who are fantastic at the big ideas and compelling visuals, but want and need to hand off the install to a seasoned team. I had a great chat about Electrosonic with Brandon Harp, a senior business development manager working out of the company's New York offices. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Brandon, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on Electrosonic and what it does that's different from a lot of the AV integrators who are out there? Brandon Harp: Sure. Thanks, David. I appreciate you having me on the podcast. I've been a longtime admirer of your content and so forth, so I've been following you for many years, so I really appreciate the opportunity. So Electrosonic is a technology professional services firm. We design, build and support innovative technology solutions that create unforgettable experiences where people live, work, and play for many years. You probably know of us from the museum and the theme park world but we've expanded over the years and have really started to focus solely on immersive and experiential environments, and so for us, we're a bit of a specialized firm. We do consider ourselves still a boutique-style AV systems integrator, but the kinds of projects that we work on are global level and span a multitude of different industries, including corporate and retail and attractions and a multitude of others. You said you expanded into this from museums and those kinds of attractions. Was that a conscious decision or is that just where the business was going? Brandon Harp: Right after Covid, we made a decision to go back to our roots, which were always these complex sort of custom environments that we had been working in for many years, which our clients best knew us for. We've done away with just the kind of typical hang-and-bang conference room projects. We still do a portion of those if there is an element to a more project that fits better into our scope. But we've really done a good job, I think, as a company of being able to identify where our strengths are and where we can really add value for our customers. And that is really in that experiential and immersive sort of environment working with video walls, various different interactives, projection mapping, and things of that nature. Is it a situation where you don't really want to do the meat, potatoes, boardroom, collaboration displays, all that sort of stuff because there's no money in it or minimal money in it, or is it just not terribly interesting? Brandon Harp: I think it's a combination of all those things, Dave, I think with the standard corporate conference rooms, it's really become a race to the bottom, and we just as a company have recognized where our strengths are on delivering these projects and really our delivery model best lends itself to more of these custom really high-end engineering projects where we need a certain level of technical ability that not all integrators have, and so those are the kinds of projects that we're setting our sights on, and that's the ones that we continue to get hired for because of our ability to not only project manage, but engineer and design. Something you might not know about us is that we actually have a full design consulting firm within our larger company, and we look at things through, I would say, a much more creative lens. So it's less about just engineering a system, and it's more about looking at it through a creative lens and saying, all right, what's the user experience? What is the story that you're trying to tell? How does that all get fused with the architecture? And then really thinking about at the end of the day, what is the human connection and what are they gonna feel as the system gets implemented and they go on to use it. Yeah, you've found this niche and pretty lucrative niche in that a lot of the AV/IT systems guys can be very good at the technical side of putting something in. But they've probably not spent a lot of time with video walls or projection mapping or inversive environments, and you just start talking about that and they're looking at you like, could you say that again? Brandon Harp: Yeah, absolutely. I think, again, it goes back to our roots, working on dark rides and so forth in theme parks. If you can imagine some of the complexities of being able to projection map in an environment like that, we've been able to essentially replicate that and bring that same methodology, that same sort of design consulting and engineering into corporate spaces, briefing centers, visitor centers, lobby attractions, things like that where you've got this sort of experiential element that we're best known for, and then we help you think through it creatively and our creative technologists and knowledge experts can really help the clients think more about, okay, what is that user experience? What do you want them to feel? As opposed to just looking at boxes and squares on walls and trying to price technology. So our approach has been a bit different, but it seems to be very effective with our clientele, and they like the fact that we're not afraid to take the technology away from them in order to really think through that content experience, to think through what is it not only short term but also the longer term for their environment. It's interesting because so many places are now being defined as attractions. So 20 years ago, an attraction was a theme park or a museum but now, as you alluded, a corporate lobby is an attraction. Brandon Harp: That's right. We've seen a big uptick in that right around the time of Covid, so 2020 and onward. What we're also seeing is that there are quite a few real estate developers now who are trying to take on these attractions. I think one that you're probably familiar with, that everyone has either been to or is aware of now, is SUMMIT One Vanderbilt, where SL Green was the real estate developer behind an attraction like that, which is an observation deck that spans multiple floors and is multi-sensory. So working with real estate developers like that who have a good understanding of real estate and square footage, how do we apply that to an attraction-based environment and help them be able to have the very best system to create that guest experience, and that's what we've been doing and that's why we've continued to get hired for these large scale projects that seem to have those sorts of elements. For that one in New York, what was driving SL Green? Brandon Harp: What was really driving SL Green was the vision that their CEO, Mark Holliday had to have this observation deck that sits high above the clouds in New York, and as part of a major building that went up just next door to Grand Central Station, which is One Vanderbilt and so 90 stories up in the air, you've got this multi-sensory experience where people can not only come and see and enjoy the views of New York but also be immersed in these various different rooms and environments that really lend itself to something for everyone. You don't necessarily have to be a tourist to enjoy it. You can also be a local or someone just passing through. But it really lends itself to something for everyone, and now we're starting to see more and more of these major supertalls that are going up, that are changing the New York skyline, having an element of an immersive experience in it, whether it's an observation deck or a lobby experience, an elevator experience, things of that nature. And where did they see the money out of that? If it's an observatory high up, I assume they're charging for that. Brandon Harp: They are. It's a paid attraction. So that uptick in paid attractions inside of corporate, what were typically fully corporate buildings is now something that we're seeing more and more of. Yes, you may have, all the other floors in the building are corporate tenants, just like One Vanderbilt. But it also has this attraction there that spans four floors. So you're starting to see this mix of not only corporate, but attraction-based entertainment, and think about it, in New York City, it's not a theme park like a Disney World or a Universal, where you've got lots and lots of acres to play with. We're talking about going vertically here for these attractions that go up in New York City. So we're starting to see a real uptick in that and really being able to apply all of that methodology that we've developed over the years in how to deliver those projects successfully for the theme park business to these corporate institutions. I'm assuming it's a bit of a delicate dance for these property developers if they do that sort of thing because if you turn your building into a tourist attraction, you're at the risk of a lot of crowds and people wandering around, and the regular tenants are fighting their way to get to the elevators and things. Brandon Harp: Yeah, I think to combat that, what they've done is for example, One Vanderbilt, they have all the tenants have their own lobby, so they're actually utilizing their own elevators and so forth. So their day is not interrupted at all by anything in terms of crowds or anyone trying to get into One Vanderbilt. For the observation deck in SUMMIT, it's got its own separate entrance and it's actually very well thought through. I think what impressed me most about SL Green was their ability to adapt to the ever-changing kind of design and environment, and they really did a good job of listening to all of the consultants that they brought in. Again, they're real estate developers, and so to take on a major attraction inside one of the largest buildings in Manhattan is something that was a bit foreign to them. But they really brought in great consultants to help them think through every aspect of this, which is why it runs so effectively and efficiently now. You mentioned that you have a design consultancy. What is all that about? Brandon Harp: So our design consultancy practice is based out of Las Vegas. We do have design consultants now that are remote as well. So we have a few here on the East coast and in Denver and a couple of other strategic places around the US and overseas in Europe. But for us, it's very much about AV consulting. What you may not know about us is that we also do security surveillance, access control, as well as information communication technology, which is your structured cabling as well as acoustics. So oftentimes we find ourselves in these conversations very early on with architects and owners and people who are designing these experiences, and so they want us to be a part of their team to help steer the technology decisions, and so we're finding that we're being hired more and more early on in these projects because we look at things through that creative lens. We consider ourselves creative technologists, very true to our trade and very client-focused throughout, and being involved very early to help steer and guide the solution through master planning is very important to the outcome of these projects, and so now what we're seeing is an uptick in design-build as well, because we're working very closely with the owner and the owner reps at an early stage to really flush out the design and the intent, and then if we're able to come in and do the AV build, which we're finding is happening more and more, there seems to be a real desire to have one hand to shake at the end of the day when it comes for all design-build and all the way through to support, which is what we offer. Do you find that the end users, whether they're property developers or just building owners or major tenants or whatever, that they are smarter or more sophisticated about what they wanna do than maybe they were 5-10 years ago? Brandon Harp: That's a great question. I think it's still a mixed bag. Honestly, I think there's oftentimes when clients come to us with blue sky ideas, or maybe they have some sort of concept renderings that they had hired a firm to put together for them and then they ask us, "How do we execute this?” and “What do we need to be able to be successful?” And I think that's where our design consulting practice comes in. We help them really think about not only the technology but more importantly, what's the outcome, how the user feels and what are they gonna experience here that's gonna make them want to continue to come back and continue to talk about this. So getting in early like that has really been very effective for us, and then the build portion of it as well, which we've always been very known for. Having a good understanding of the project from day one has really made it very effective for us. How important is scale? We've seen all kinds of press releases about a LED video wall that's 60 feet wide or 100 feet wide, whatever the dimensions are. But I'm wondering if you're starting to see a more sophisticated approach where you are not just thinking about the scale, but how it fits, how is this gonna work within the environment? All those sorts of things. Brandon Harp: Yeah, I think some of the clientele has thought that through or they've gathered information from other projects. Some do have maybe a bit of a more sophisticated approach, or they have someone who's a technology advisor who's been helping them think through things. I think where we come in is really to be able to help them take that to fruition, right? And take it to the next step. So I do think it's still a bit of a mixed bag. In terms of the scale itself, it depends on the project. I think we do a number of projects that are gonna have multiple locations over and over again, and we create this blueprint for those, but we also do a lot of these one-off projects, as you can imagine, especially when it comes to museums and theme parks and briefing centers and things of that nature where it's one of a kind experience and we really have to be able to deliver on what the client's looking for. Yeah, and that's a bit of a challenge I would imagine. One-off projects are awesome when they come along, but it becomes a bit of a roller coaster ride as opposed to the predictable recurring services you might be providing. Brandon Harp: It is very much and we find with these one-off projects that because of the size and the scale of them, typically they take anywhere from a year onwards to be able to complete. So you can imagine that requires a great deal of patience and skill and making sure that we have updated schedules just strong project management, and strong design engineering early on to make sure that we have the very best system in place. But, also the supply chain is another thing, right? And so not to go too far of a rabbit hole on that. But if your projects are typically a year to a year and a half in length, often what we're finding now is that the client wants to know right out of the gates, are there any stumbling blocks in terms of supply chain challenges? And then we have to order this material, and equipment very early on in the process in order to combat that or we have to find something else that we can use in order to deliver the system on time and within budget. So it's a bit of, as you said, a rollercoaster is a great way to describe it. You said a year and a half. With some airports and let's say hospital campuses, that's probably more like a 4-5 year planning cycle, right? Brandon Harp: Certainly, yeah. I think the year to a year and a half seems to be average, but yes, to your point, we often find ourselves involved in airport projects and so forth where the delivery date is 2026 or 2028 even now. And again, I think it has to do with being able to get in early with the right people, make sure that we're providing them with what they need to be successful, and then staying in touch and in tune with what's going on through the life cycle of the project and the management of it. Project management in AV has always been a hot point, right? And so for us, it's very much about the project managers being able to see through a project of that length properly and show it the adequate attention that it needs to be successful. I'm also guessing that because you're sometimes looking that far out for an airport or something like that, you really need to stay on top of emerging technology and think about, okay, I'm not thinking about what I'm going to put in right now with what's available right now, I'm thinking about what's going to be out there three years from now, which might be micro LED or something else that isn't really commercially available right now. Brandon Harp: That's very true and that's a great point. It's certainly something that we take into consideration on all of these projects. I think you have to look at the manufacturers and the longevity of their companies. Are they gonna be around for many years to come? And what does the product roadmap look like? And I think that's why we have our key partners that we work with who are very good at understanding what's coming, what's future, making sure that they stay top of mind with all of our designers and our engineers to ensure that at the end of the day when the system is installed, that it is the most recent and up to date technology, and it's not something that's going to be phased out or end of life that just simply isn't feasible when it comes to spares or replacements, anything like that. So Thinking that through, especially on these longer projects is really important and that's what makes us effective. I've been intrigued when I've seen big design agencies like Gensler or content-driven technology shops like Moment Factory where they've worked with you guys a lot because I get the sense they know what they're good at, they know how far they can take a big idea, but at some point, they have to hand it off to somebody who's good at the execution. Brandon Harp: That's exactly right. We have developed, I think, the kind of the secret sauce for being able to work with companies like Gensler and Moment Factory, because you're right, at the end of the day, they're the big thinkers, right? They're the creatives who ultimately generate the user experience that is on those LED video walls, or on the digital signage or the interactive, or the inside of the projection mapping, and so forth. For us, we have to play that supporting role and not every project is exactly the same, but we do understand what their strengths and capabilities are And then we play a very supporting role in that, and we've now made it so that it's a well-oiled machine and as partners, we're very agile and limber enough to be able to say, we need to pivot a little bit, or we need to look at this a little bit differently than the last one. And again, not Two projects are all the same, and so I think it's our ability to work with them and adapt to ever-changing circumstances and projects and environments that allow us to be as effective together as we are. Do you try hard to stay in your lane, so to speak, and not get into the creative stuff? Brandon Harp: I think at the end of the day, you have to have a creative vein in you to work here, right? That's ultimately what we do. We're constantly pushing the envelope of what's possible, but we also have to put the trust in our partners, and I think we do a really good job of that. We've never been a company that's done content or experience design, and the reason for that is that we have a multitude of partners who do and who do it very well, and so for us, it's more about playing that supporting role with making sure that the technology is something that they can work with when they're creating their content but it's also something that is gonna be easy for the end user to use if that's a requirement, and really just play that supporting role. I think that, at the end of the day, what people see in what they view on these large displays, as you talked about, is really the product of the creative minds that go into the content and the storytelling, and we're there to play that supportive role. I think that's more what I'm asking is: you guys conceivably could have a creative team that would produce the big visuals and so on, but because you work with some great partners, you do your thing and let them do their thing and don't get into a competition. Brandon Harp: That's right. There's no competition there. Where I think we do is supplement them very well is our executive consulting. So we have Will Bolen, Chris Conti, and Chris Moore, who are executive consultants who work for us, those three individuals are super talented. They've got a great deal of experience, both working hand in hand with clients to help them think through what it is that they're looking to do with their space. But they're also very technical, right? So they come up with sketches and little drawings and things like that can really make them multi-faceted individuals within the company, and that's why they're so effective. Oftentimes they get paired with the likes of Moment Factory or Gensler or an architect or an experienced design firm who's looking to help their client uncover what is possible with the technology and then from there, we work it through design consulting and into systems integration, and then all the way through to service. Do you have end users who are coming to you and just basically saying, “I want that!” because they've seen something? Brandon Harp: Yeah, believe it or not, they do, and I revert back to SUMMIT One Vanderbilt again because it's very unique. It's award-winning and it's just something that everybody, I think is aware of or familiar with now, especially in New York City and they constantly are saying, how do we create that, or even in the airport environments like we just did Terminal A at Newark, I've had multiple airports say to me, “We want that 232-foot long video wall right at departures or behind the check encounter” and our response to that, Dave, is often, do something different. It's great to be able to pull inspiration from other projects, but no one wants to see the same project replicated. So how do you pull inspiration from something that's that unique, but then put your own spin on it? And especially in an airport environment, because it is high traffic, it's a public place, millions of people and users go through there. How do you do something that differentiates? And that's what we always try to coach our clients into thinking about, what is it that's gonna make you the next talk of the town? How do you get yourself to that point where people are taking selfies or people are talking about the technology and the experience that they had as they moved through the airport? So those are the kinds of things we keep in mind. Yeah, there are really two tracks in airports. You've got the big immersive experiential, almost like public art installations, but then you've got a lot of LED and flat panel displays that are just about making the experience of getting your way through the airport to a gate and onto a plane easier. Brandon Harp: I actually think there are three, Dave. I would add the digital out-of-home experience as well there, because there's the Clear Channels and the Intersections of the world all have these large contracts with these airports and real estate owners who have their screens as well And in a lot of these airport environments, like Newark for example, there are over 80 displays there that is specifically geared towards targeted advertising. Then you've got your art piece, which you mentioned, which is more experiential and immersive, and then the third pillar is the typical airport communications, right? Because people have to know where their flight is and how to get from point A to point B, whether it's wayfinding or something of that nature. But there's really a multitude of digital endpoints that go into any airport or terminal experience. Yeah, I have been blabbering away lately that if you really wanna see the state of the art of digital signage and how that technology is applied in different ways, go look at a renovated or new airport terminal. Brandon Harp: It's true, and the government's flushing a lot of money into obviously the infrastructure and redevelopment of these airports. That trend we feel is gonna continue and it's gonna continue to push the envelope for what is possible. I think at the end of the day, you're finding that these old, outdated airports really just need a refresh, something that's gonna make people wanna fly out of there. Something that's gonna set the tone for the trip that they're about to go on. But also just as silly as it sounds, put a smile on their face. If there's a way to make people feel at home or comfortable or keep them entertained so that they're buying more concessions within an airport environment, that's a huge win for that terminal and that airport. I just wanna know where my gate is, how to get there, and how long is it gonna take me to get through the various lines. Brandon Harp: And maybe where the bar is? Never. (Laughter) Is there a trend that you're starting to see emerge? Brandon Harp: Yeah I think there is. I think, just at the start of 2023, we've seen a real uptick when it comes to experiential and immersive environments in higher education, but also in sports. We're finding more and more of these higher education institutions wanna give students access to a big video wall that may have a multitude of interactive touchpoints and ways of being able to use the system itself and interact with it across a multitude of different tracks throughout the school. So there's been a lot of that recently and then sports as well. These kinds of one-off experiences within stadiums and training facilities and things like that. There really has been an uptick in those through since the start of the year and we're expecting that trend to continue. Is there a big project that you're allowed to talk about that we're gonna see in the next calendar year? Brandon Harp: I can't really get into the specifics and the name of it, but the one that comes to mind for me is an immersive museum experience that's gonna be happening downtown in Manhattan, just outside of The Oculus, so a well-traveled area. It's a building that probably anybody who's from New York or has been to that part of the area is gonna be revamped and it's gonna be led by an immersive artist and a team of people who are really invested in not only the video but the audio portion of any given museum experience. So you can expect upwards of 20+ video walls and large-scale rooms with huge projection-mapped walls, floors, and ceilings. Just a variety of different experiences as you travel through each room. So it's something that's on the horizon, and the scheduled opening date is right around Labor Day of this year. So we'll see if that holds true. But in any case, it is something that's upcoming and we can give you more information on it as it unfolds. That's led by a real estate developer? Brandon Harp: It is another real estate developer, so much like we were talking about earlier in the conversation with SL Green, this is another company that's very prominent in New York. This is the first real venture for them into more of the attractions type of space. So they do need a lot of help, but we're there to provide it and the support that they need to be successful, and we really anticipate this being a game changer for them and especially for lower Manhattan. All right, Brandon, thank you! Brandon Harp: Yeah, thanks, Dave. I appreciate you having me on today.

covid-19 ceo new york new york city europe las vegas project east manhattan universal summit honestly labor day led disney world av newark oculus harp intersections gensler chris moore grand central station moment factory one vanderbilt av it mark holliday

AVSF: Live - The Death of AV

AV SuperFriends

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 6, 2023 62:11

Recorded February 24, 2023 This is the audio recording of our live session at the HETMA 2023 Conference. We proclaimed that AV is dead and simply part of the larger IT umbrella… or is it! We were joined by Ryan Gray of Yavapai College who wrote in a few weeks earlier suggesting a new approach to the continuing AV/IT convergence, so we put him on the panel. Thanks to HETMA for the opportunity to share with the community and for all those who asked live questions. HETMA: https://www.hetma.org

ISE 2023 Wrap Up

Digital Signage Done Right

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 21, 2023 26:35

ISE 2023 Wrap Up EPISODE 108 | Guest: Brian Galante, president and co-founder of Dimension PR Trade shows are one of the most important ways that vendors can introduce new products, check in on technology trends and form lasting partnerships. For the first time in years, crowds are returning to the show floor in full force to see what's new in the AV/IT industry. In this episode, we get a quick wrap-up of the major themes and products on show at this year's Integrated Systems Europe show from Brian Galante. - Get the skinny on show attendance and vendor partnerships - Explore the growing crossover between residential and commercial markets - Delve into the main themes of the event: immersion, collaboration and sustainability - Look at hot products on the show floor: holograms, audio innovations and powerless displays - Hear about new space booking tech and trends for the modern workplace Get the full transcript here Learn more about Integrated Systems Europe here

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S1E297: אנשים ומחשבים פרק 297: תפקיד חדש נולד?

אנשים ומחשבים

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 31, 2023 15:05

תפקיד חדש נולד? היכרות עם כוח האדם שעומד מאחורי עיצוב ממשק העבודה של אנשי ה-IT שיחה עם רועי ליברמן, Solutions Architect ברד האט. מראיינים: יהודה קונפורטס, עורך ראשי קבוצת אנשים ומחשבים ורון קסלר עורך הפודקסט. לקראת כנס המולטימדיה AV - TLV 2023 שיערך ב-29.3.23 09:00 LAGO המאה ועשרים 6, ראשון לציון הפאנלים שלנו באיירוע: • אתגרי המשולש בתכנון הקמפוסים וחללי העבודה בעידן של שינוי מתמיד - כיצד האדריכל, יועץ ה AV ומחלקת ה IT יכולים לגשר על הקונפליקטים השונים • תפקיד חדש נולד? ארגונים מובילים מגייסים מנהל AV לתוך יחידת ה IT כחלק מהטמעת הטרנספורמציה הדיגיטלית ויישום כלי העבודה החדשים ניתן גם להירשם לכנס באתר אנשים ומחשבים See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

lago solutions architect av it

AVWeek 596: AV Drama

women president drama vice president av regional sales manager ise av it

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 23, 2023 24:29

It's time to look at the latest news surrounding the commercial side of the AV industry, and discuss it amongst a panel of experts. Experts like President of Frank DJ & Event Services Willie Franklin, Regional Sales Manager for Avocor Kylie Pfile, and Vice President of EDGE Patrick Whipkey.The Women in AV/IT group is established, DTEN has multi-platform products for ISE, and asking if IT and AV are really one and the same.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

90: The world of AV & Pro Audio, flash news: it's all dudes ft Samantha Potter (Allen & Heath)

(in-person, virtual & hybrid) Events: demystified

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 16, 2022 51:12

As we continue with another kick a$$ woman in AV and event productions part of the SEASON FIVE - WOMEN BEHIND THE SCENES IN EVENTS AND EVENT PRODUCTIONS, it is my great pleasure to introduce to you, Samantha Potter - Audio Engineer & Install Empress, currently at Allen & Heath USA serving as the manager of the installation and commercial audio. With a diverse background in AV/IT, production management, and system design, she also serves as a senior editor and author for ProSoundWeb, Church Sound Magazine, and Live Sound International. Growing up a classical musician, Samantha discovered live sound by way of the studio and eventually began developing curricula for houses of worship while managing the production of funk and R&B bands in the midwest. Her show, Church Sound Podcast, can be found on all major podcasting platforms. UNIQUE FACTS Started in studio work Love the blend of computers and technology with live events/music ---------------- Just a quick review, if this is your first time listening to the podcast, this season has been on my mind for many moons and it's been a long time in the making. I am super stoked to introduce and interview many bad-a$$ women behind the scenes and in front of scenes, in events and event productions, and so in the next few episodes we will take some time to share their journey in the area of expertise they're each championing, the challenges they had to overcome and the passion that drives them to stay and keep pushing forward in a male-dominated field. Stay tuned for some spectacular humans joining me on the air in the upcoming weeks! ---------------- “Events: demystified” Podcast is brought to you by Tree-Fan Events and your Podcast Host is Anca Trifan. Let's chat about your event, and schedule a time that works for you via the 20 min free consultation link. Original Podcast Music written and produced by Fable Score Music. ---------------- September will be the launch of our brand new season: Women Behind the Scenes in Events. Stay tuned for some fantastic featured guests! For event and podcast updates, tips, and tricks of the trade, follow us on these social channels: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eventsdemystifiedpodcast Become a Patron on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/eventsdemystified ---------------- Tree-Fan Events offers Hybrid Event Production Services: https://treefanevents.com/hybrid-event-services/ ---------------- If you like our podcast, please show us some love by subscribing to this podcast on your favorite listening platform and following us on YouTube and Instagram. By leaving a great review and hitting the 5 stars, you make this Podcast visible to other listeners with the same interests as you. Until next time! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/eventsdemystified/message

love events podcast hosts scenes av dudes women behind pro audio flash news av it anca trifan tree fan events samantha potter allen heath prosoundweb

Telmo Silva, ClicData

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2022 37:43

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Integrating data has increasingly climbed the priority list for more ambitious and involved digital signage and digital OOH projects. The big driver for that is how near or real-time data makes what's on-screen automated and triggered, which means more timely, targeted and therefore relevant messaging. Lots of CMS software companies offer some degree of data integration and on-screen presentation, and we're starting to see some third-party companies that work mainly in digital signage - like Screenfeed - also offering data display toolsets. We're also now seeing well-established data handling companies making themselves known in this sector, particularly to help make some of the more complicated set-ups both happen and then reliably, and securely, work. ClicData is a software firm based up in the northwest of France, but has clients globally that use its Business Intelligence platform to bring data in from more than 250 sources - into a single, harmonized data warehouse. I spoke with co-founder and CTO Telmo Silva about Clicdata's roots, how its platform works and how it can be applied in digital signage applications. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT David: Telmo, thank you very much for joining me. Can you tell me what ClicData is all about? Telmo Silva: I started ClicData in 2008 as a pharmaceutical-focused data analytics company, and later branched out a little bit into making it a wider-used data analysis, data management and data intelligence tool for all sectors, and hence the name, ClicData from ClicPharma before, and yes, this tool is really the culmination of that learning in the pharmaceutical sector that we thought is applicable to really any sector. David: Okay. So if I'm sitting here listening to the beginning of this podcast, some people might be wondering, those in digital signage and the AV sector, might be wondering, okay, why am I listening to this? How does it plug into that sector? Telmo Silva: Absolutely, and it's funny, Dave, because an acquaintance of ours asked me, should we do this podcast? And I said, yes, absolutely, because everything generates data and digital advertising is definitely one of the factors. You have to know where you're spending your money and what you're requiring and who's looking at things, and one of the first clients we had in the early days was actually a Canadian company out west that had this technology on elevators to take snapshots of peoples and try to recognize their age group and their demographics and as they're playing the videos on the small screen on the elevator, try to figure out what's the retention? Are their eyes moving and moving away from the screen and so forth, and how long do they stay hooked for those short 30-second clips, and things like that? And that was actually my first introduction to digital advertising and a use case for ClicData, a very successful use case, and I was hooked on that. I was hooked into that so much that where ClicData is based out, which is France, there's a very large history of retail companies here that spent a lot of money on aisle advertising, and they start using those concepts, not only in terms of video and monitoring but also in terms of monitoring the paths of customers through their stores, optimization of aisles and things like that, where to put the digital signs and advertising and so forth, and all that generates a lot of data that you have to make sense of. And this is really well ClicData comes in, right? Those point solutions with digital advertising are part one, but without actually collecting all these from the different stores, and different locations that start making sense of it, it's just data, right? It does not turn into information until you do something with it and that's really where we come in, in trying to bring as much data from the different systems and different points of information really that a company may have, or a client may have and bring that into something that makes sense, that you can aggregate, that you can slice and dice, and then further down the line, then expose that to your customers, and say, okay, this is what you paid for. David: So you're aggregating and harmonizing and developing insights around the data as opposed to being a collector of data, right? Like you're not doing any of the computer vision or sensor-based work yourself? Telmo Silva: We do not, but we do have all the necessary connections just with the different systems. Unlike potentially other systems that are very well standardized, each vendor of those displays of those collectors may have their own interfaces, APIs and so forth. They may have their own storage formats and as you use the different systems, your challenge is really to understand, how can I connect to this one now, and how can I extract information that I want out of that. And our connectors are actually quite flexible in that sense where we have fixed connectors for some of those systems, but for others, we have generic connectors that you can kind of configure to tap into that data. David: Would this be something that might be called middleware? Telmo Silva: I would say potentially, yes. It depends on your definition of middleware. Ultimately we see business intelligence at least the portion of data analytics and reporting that we offer, as the next step before you feed it back and you go, okay, now I understand the results that I've received here, what improvements are we gonna make? And we start to cycle again, right? So again as an example, you may start receiving data from certain videos and start saying, okay, this is the demographics and so forth, can I make some adjustments to my campaigns or to my videos or to the sequence of videos that I'm displaying? Again, I'm going back to that video on the elevator concept and optimising that, so it is part of that loop of data collection, data analysis, making decisions based on that data, and then feeding that back into the loop again. David: When you started the company accessing data from all kinds of different data sources was very complicated and time-consuming, and you had to get all kinds of permissions and all kinds of meetings and phone calls and everything else to work it out. One of the things that I gather has changed over the last decade or so is that most platforms now have APIs, it's easier to get stuff out of them, and so on. So has your role lessened, or has it increased because they're always changing and there are so many and if you're an independent company, like a digital signage company, a software company, you have to stay on top of that, or you would use a company like ClicData that's spending all their time doing that and making it easy? Telmo Silva: To answer your first question, it has actually increased, right? Whereas before we would ask a vendor whether that be Facebook or Google and say, our mutual customers have data on your advertising network, right? And again this kind of can expand to any type of data vendor or data collector that we may tap into and before they would basically know it's our data, and the consumers of course start reacting against that, right? Today, If you do not have an API, if all you do is get my data into your system, but not give me anything back in return, then I don't want anything to do with you. And we've seen backlashes at times with Facebook, Cambridge Analytics and things like that, where those types of sharing are also kinda gone another way rather, but nonetheless, today, if you do not have an API, then you're a second-class citizen on the internet and on the software technology stack. So that is great but an API is still an API. It is a programming interface and it does require some knowledge and it's not a standard. Just because we call it an API does not mean that they'll follow the same standard, it's very well organized, and it's very well understood. So every API has its nuances, its little quirks and its own way of paging through the amounts of data that it can offer. And so our role has actually increased due to that, because again, as I was mentioning before our connectors know how to deal with those different variations and those different formats and schemas that the data may be provided with. So in that sense, it's actually increased the need to have a tool, like ClicData, to be able to tap into those APIs and bring it into a format that is easily digestible by any analytics tool, including our own tool. David: How much is involved, if you wanted to do this yourself and let's say you wanted to Integrate information from four different business system sources or whatever, within your company? Is that something that would take a morning, a month, or a year to do if they weren't using something like ClicData? Telmo Silva: If they were not using something like ClicData, they obviously need somebody technical, but it would take an extensive amount of time for development, and again, large companies still do that, where they write custom interfaces to bring the data and amalgamate them into one single source of truth. This is where millions of dollars are being spent on data warehousing projects and business intelligence implementations and so forth. So not having a tool like ours definitely would require a good technical team, and again, depending on the sources, potentially database analysts, database experts, SQL developers, API developers, whether they do it in Java or Python or what have you. And then bringing all that into a data warehouse will definitely take more than just a few days. In my previous life, prior to creating ClicData, that was my bread and butter, and these projects would go on for 3-6 months. With ClicData, if we have the connector that you need or if you can configure your API connector and you have a basic understanding of APIs, you should be able to do that within a day, to connect three or four data sources and start seeing the data flow through into ClicData. David: So on a project launch basis and certainly on an ongoing operating basis, it sounds like if you're running a spreadsheet model on this and a business argument, it would take a huge amount of cost out of the equation and time, and these are people you don't need to hire? Telmo Silva: It goes on to just beyond hiring and the people behind it, because, having somebody who can accompany you if you're not an expert or in the technical side, then it may be worth it. But the bottom line is the continuity of it as well. It's okay to build a prototype. It works once but the next day, you don't want to have to do the same thing, right? You don't want to have to copy and paste the data into Excel or out of Excel again and repeat and so forth. And also, technology is what it is, business evolves as it is, and so you always need these adjustments. It is an investment that you have to make towards being data-centric, being data-focused and to say, I want to build these systems that collect the data on an ongoing basis that I can automate the reporting that can save you time as well in reporting these numbers back to your team or your clients or your management team and all this combines into the ROI that you're looking for, and yes, there is a technical side of it as well that there will be savings, whether it's in consulting or in minimizing, at least the number of times that you involve them, to gain access to your data. David: If I'm a customer, what am I buying and how am I paying for it? Do you buy an enterprise license or is it software as a service? Telmo Silva: It is totally software as a service. We do not offer any on-premise installations of software, and this is because we want to be rapid at giving new features, new connectors. Connectors continuously change, and there's new software in the market and we wanna be rapid in making those available. So software as a service is really our model, and what you get when you subscribe to when you get one of these subscriptions, which is monthly or yearly based, is you get basically all the connectors. You get a data warehouse, a database available to you through Microsoft Azure, that's our partner, and you can have your data stored in over eight different regions around the world: US, Ireland, Canada, Germany, France, and a few others, and once you have that data warehouse, that's your piece of the database there, the data starts flowing through the connectors. Once that is in your data warehouse, then from there you can actually build downstream flows, you can tap into it directly with Excel if you want, or you can use our dashboard tool to start creating dashboards and graphs and charts and tables indicators. You can share those dashboards with other people. You can publish them to your customers, et cetera, and then you can just automate these things so that it just does that every day or every morning or every hour. David: Is that the primary output that you would see for digital signage and digital out-of-home home networks, probably more so on the digital signage side, would be data visualizations and dashboards? Telmo Silva: I think that would potentially be one of the use cases, analyzing the data that's coming through and making decisions based on those as normal reporting and analytics data tools would. The other part of it and some customers of ClicData do this is they just use the collection capabilities of ClicData and the data warehouse to store their data, but then they feed that into other tools of their choice, tools that potentially they wanna do some more advanced machine learning on the data, maybe they want to write their own special code to analyze it, or maybe simply feed another system that requires this data to consume it and so forth. ClicData is really a multifaceted tool that can be either used just for collection and aggregation of the data or all the way through to data visualization and analytics. David: Okay, so you would have almost like templates or widgets of some kind that would be able to do develop dynamic charting and things like this based on what you select? Telmo Silva: Absolutely, much like you would do on a pivot table in Excel, to drag and drop some columns, and the chart starts taking shape with columns, rows and so forth. That's exactly our design, it's very user-friendly as much as we can, we do have a lot of options for styling because not everybody likes the same styles and colors, but in essence, it's very much an Excel-like data visualization tool built into ClicData. David: If I'm a digital signage CMS software provider and I'm working with, let's say a financial services company and they wanted data visualization, if I wanna put that visualized chart into a schedule, so it shows up on the digital signs around the workplace. Is that an HTML file or how do you get that up on a screen? Telmo Silva: If you want to embed our dashboards into third-party applications, into screens, we have quite a few customers that have screens around the office, we have a railroad train station system that actually publishes our dashboards on every single station and stops with the schedules and things like that, and their performance, so are they late, etc. So you can definitely embed that, and it's just simply a URL. You put that inside an iFrame, inside your web page, and the iframe immediately refreshes if the data has been refreshed, so you don't have to do anything, you just have to open it up in a browser, maximize the screen and boom, your dashboard is live and will refresh automatically. David: Aare there any kind of limitations on how real-time it is or is it just how you wanna set it and how it works at the other end, in terms of data generation? Telmo Silva: Our schedules have the ability to go on a minute basis to your data sources and pull the data in, however you can use our API, because we too have an API, to push data in, and in that case, the push is up to you. If you wanna send it once per second, you can. These will not be full data loads. These have to be small packets, a few rows, a few hundred rows at a time, potentially. But you can use our API to bring in real-time data, and again, the same concept, whether we pulled it or you pushed it, everything downstream gets refreshed and gets activated for you. David: I suspect that's a conversation that you and your sales engineers have at times with resellers and end users, “Sure we could do real-time, but for the application you're talking about, do you really need that, or is every minute or every five minutes fine?” Telmo Silva: Absolutely, and this is why we stopped our schedule at one minute. Again, you have to be really in a high traffic, high volume situation, and to be able to make a decision in real-time, and that's ultimately the key, right? It really is up to you and there's the cost associated with you developing a push notification to other systems as well. So it really is up to the customers, but yeah, in some sectors there are times that some folks ask for real-time when in fact, their data doesn't change on a daily basis. Case in point, Facebook, they themselves only refresh their own metrics or expose their own metrics on a much larger time scale. So for us to do real-time with certain systems and certain data sources is just refreshing and using bandwidth for nothing. David: Do you have to make statements and assurances around privacy of the data or that's not really your issue, whoever's collecting that data or you're gathering that data is the one that's gonna have to worry about that, you're just enabling the use of that data? Telmo Silva: Even though obviously data privacy and respecting the customer's data is our number one thing, we do have a role to play. If we're talking in Europe, GDPR is a huge thing. Every country has their own protection laws and privacy protection, like the California Data Protection Act. Every country and state and province has their own or has started some type of laws and regulations. Us being a European company, but with customers in North America, we have to be very careful. This is why we're almost the only ones that actually are able to start your data warehouse in any country that you wish in those eight regions that we've mentioned, and that's step number one, but we are a data processor for you. We don't know what your data is, but we are processing your data for you. It's our application, and we are responsible to make sure that there's no external access to it, that if there are court orders, we have to make sure we validate and check them with our customers and so forth. Luckily that has never happened, but we don't know what your data is. So we are not able to be really responsible for it, but that's part of our terms of service. If you put data that you are not entitled to use or process if you put data that is not legal for you to own, that's the responsibility of our customers, but obviously, we would have a role to play in that in this GDPR system where we are responsible to at least point out or give it out if asked legally, obviously. David: I assume you get a lot of questions around security as well. Telmo Silva: Oh, absolutely, and again, this is why we partner with Microsoft Azure. Our expertise is really making the software intelligent, and easy to use, that it processes fast, that we can process thousands and thousands of files and sources and dashboards a day, an hour really, and not really on the physical and digital security of these data warehouses and systems. And this is why we rely on Microsoft Azure severely. We have a strong SLA with them to protect our property and our customer's property, their data. David: I know almost nothing about the technical side of what your company and others like it would do, but I assume that a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of security is on the Azure side and you take advantage of that and you let them worry about that, but, make sure that you're working according to their policies, right? Telmo Silva: Absolutely, but it also takes our knowledge to encrypt the data and to make sure that their configuration is set up correctly. I think that is the positive and negative of cloud-based systems, like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. It's so easy these days to just start a server anywhere and start putting data into it. It's much harder to make sure that nobody else has access to it and to make sure that it's protected and so forth. And even within Microsoft, there are some checks and balances there as well. We can't say, just because it's Microsoft's or Amazon or Google that takes care of your data, we're pawning it off on them, and if something happens, let's go to court. That's not how it should be handled. There has to be some responsibility on the people using those systems, and how we code the application, and to make sure all the settings are set up correctly. So it is a team effort between the vendors and us, and also our customers to make sure that they're comfortable with the fact that we are ISO certified, SOC certified HIPAA compliant, et cetera. This is time and an investment on our part to make sure that they should not be just for the sake of having a stamp, on your website saying, “We are ISO certified” and that's it. It does take effort from both companies and all parties involved to make sure that the data is secure and private. David: So Microsoft is a major business partner, but they're also a competitor, through Power BI? Telmo Silva: That is correct. Power BI, their visualization tool is a competitor to our data visualization module, not necessarily to the whole ClicData platform, and they do an excellent job at it as well. David: But I assume your company has its share of competitors, right? Telmo Silva: I believe there's data visualization for every type of business in the world. Power BI, Tableau, ClickView. I don't wanna name more than three, but there are at least three hundred of them, and let's not even go beyond those, let's just talk about Excel, there's some amazing visualization in Excel and it has been around for years. So there's a lot of great experience, but again, these are tools and they are distinct separate tools, and if you have to load up Excel or Power BI or whatever every day to hit refresh, and then export it out and think about security and access, then that's the downside of these tools. They do a great job for that initial data investigation but are terrible for the ongoing maintenance of it. So what we say is, whereas we may not be as advanced as some of those tools, potentially. If you're trying to do something very specific that only Power BI can do, maybe we cannot do it. The upside of using our tool is that you don't have to do anything else. The data is there as soon as it's refreshed, the dashboards know that the data is refreshed, it immediately sends emails out to the people that are on the list for receiving this dashboard, and they get it on their mobile app. They get an alert, whatever, right? It's all automated for you. So if you want to spend less time wasting copying and pasting and using Excel and these tools, then, these are the types of platforms that you need to look for. David: I assume the other thing is that you stay on top of it because APIs change and data sets change and everything else and if you just had it developed yourself internally or if you outsourced the development, a month later, the schemas and things could change and all of a sudden it doesn't work, right? Telmo Silva: Absolutely. We see that with the big players obviously, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and others are constantly improving their APIs. Security keeps changing around the world. We're phasing out certain types of security, TLS 1, TLS 2, et cetera, and APIs need the security, they need to be compatible with it. So this is really where most of our customers get their benefits is to say, okay, ClicData is taking care of all that for you, and then make sure that the data keeps coming in, and flowing into your data warehouse. David: So if I'm a digital signage content management systems software provider, or Perhaps an AV/IT systems integrator who has an ask from clients or wants to incorporate this into their service offers, what's involved? What are the first questions you have to ask them? Do you support this, do you support that, or are there any really real barriers? Telmo Silva: We start by looking at their data sources, right? If we can't bring the data, if they're using a very specific format of a very specific system that we cannot gain access to, typically very old ones then we're upfront about it. We say that you're not gonna get this data in, and you're not gonna be able to report it. David: It's on a mainframe system or something? Telmo Silva: Mainframe, believe it or not, we can connect to it. It is important for us and believe it or not, there are still a lot of customers, especially in the retail sector that does mainframe, IBM series of servers, those things that we thought don't exist. They exist and they exist in quite a lot of companies. So we still support those. But sometimes it's just very cryptic or the format. I cannot give you an example off the top of my head but we have this, as I mentioned before, a very robust kind of API connecting connector that takes a lot of options, and most of the time we can configure it to fit. But yeah, if you're a provider of data that pretty much says: I'm not giving you access. I can only give you monthly reports or something like that. Yeah, you can import those reports monthly by hand. Is that something that you really wanna do, et cetera? So we discuss alternate solutions like that. But yeah, that would be the first step. The second step is what are their objectives? Are they looking for visualization and embedding these dashboards and putting them back to their customer in a self-service mode so they can monitor the success of their campaigns, their ads network, et cetera? Or is this internal use for analytics and so forth? So we discuss those items to make sure that ClicData is the right solution for them, and if all checks out, I think then the next step is just to get a trial account for 15 days and connect a couple of data sources, see what you can build. We have an in-app chat tool that allows them to ask questions as they go along during their trials. Ask your questions, ask how you can do things and get that first initial prototype, and that's a big advantage of being a SaaS product, there's no installation, you lose nothing, right? You don't have to install or return servers. You just get started, start connecting your data and start playing around with your data and start visualizing and prototyping within your team, get success quickly, get motivated quickly as well. That's a big part of it, and from there, you just start your subscription level. David: What level of skill do you need? Telmo Silva: To do complex things, you definitely need some SQL sometimes, some function programming, as you do with Excel, we are all different experts in Excel. There are those of us that use Excel just to type in numbers and your basic drag and drop, and that's it. And then there's those that know to do Lookups and they know a few more functions and then there's those that do Macros in Excel, right? There are different skills, and with us, it's the same thing. It really depends on what you need to do and how much your data needs work. So we have our own kind of Excel-like language that they can use, very similar to SQL as well. They can do a lot of things with the data. We needed to make ClicData very powerful, and very flexible to ensure that we will not be stumped by a specific need or a specific customer request. But at the surface, we also try to make it easy with a strong UI to write those hard-to-write functions behind the scenes through an interface that is a little bit easier to use. David: So at a minimum, you want somebody who has an interest or a knack for this sort of thing, as opposed to Margaret in Sales and Marketing saying, “Here, you do this!” and she gets the deer and the headlights look? Telmo Silva: Absolutely. Now you can, if you have, and some customers of ours do this and they split the work of connecting and making the data available versus consuming the data, right? You have your technical person, the person that knows the data very well to create these kinds of slices and catalogues of data and make them available to the rest of the team, and the team then goes in, either with our dashboard editor or report editor, and does their own dashboards and their own kind of visualizations or with other tools as well. So there are also those splitting of functions that sometimes are important to put in place into a company. David: ClicData is in Northwest France based in Lille, correct? Telmo Silva: Yeah, we have three major offices. That is our head office, the engineering office in the north of France. We have one in Toronto, Canada, and we have one in Texas so we're all over the place a little bit. David: So Europeans are gonna engage through your European offices and Canadians and Americans can find a couple of offices on this side of the pond? Telmo Silva: That's correct. David: Where do they find you online? Telmo Silva: ClicData.com David: It's important to say there's no “k” in the click. Somebody got to it before you could get the one with the “k”? Telmo Silva: I believe so, or maybe at that point in time, we wanted to make it very even with four and four, Clic and Data, I'm not sure. David: Oh, they'll find it. Thank you very much for spending some time with me. Telmo Silva: Thank you for having me.

AVWeek 566: Verified AV

av verified infocomm av it

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 27, 2022

Looking at the numbers for InfoComm 2022 and if physical trade shows are once again a success, and why device security is undervalued within the AV industry.

AVWeek 566: Verified AV

av verified infocomm av it

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 27, 2022 30:19

Looking at the numbers for InfoComm 2022 and if physical trade shows are once again a success, and why device security is undervalued within the AV industry.

AVWeek 566: Verified AV

av verified infocomm av it

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 27, 2022

Looking at the numbers for InfoComm 2022 and if physical trade shows are once again a success, and why device security is undervalued within the AV industry.

Daily Download Tuesday June 21, 2022

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 21, 2022

Looking at how AV and IT are inseparable at this stage of technology.

av av it atlasied

Daily Download Tuesday June 21, 2022

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 21, 2022

Looking at how AV and IT are inseparable at this stage of technology.

av av it atlasied

Daily Download Tuesday June 21, 2022

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 21, 2022 5:00

Looking at how AV and IT are inseparable at this stage of technology. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

av av it atlasied

Daily Download Tuesday May 24, 2022

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2022 2:13

Looking at the similarities between AV and IT personnel. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

av av it atlasied

Daily Download Tuesday May 24, 2022

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2022

Looking at the similarities between AV and IT personnel.

av av it atlasied

Daily Download Tuesday May 24, 2022

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2022

Looking at the similarities between AV and IT personnel.

av av it atlasied

IT Factor 53: Reverse-Engineering The AV Engineer

engineering engineers factor av reverse engineering av it

Play Episode Listen Later May 6, 2022 52:56

Discussing the nomenclature of designers and engineers when it comes to the AV industry. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

IT Factor 53: Reverse-Engineering The AV Engineer

engineering engineers factor av reverse engineering av it

Play Episode Listen Later May 6, 2022

Discussing the nomenclature of designers and engineers when it comes to the AV industry.

IT Factor 53: Reverse-Engineering The AV Engineer

engineering engineers factor av reverse engineering av it

Play Episode Listen Later May 6, 2022

Discussing the nomenclature of designers and engineers when it comes to the AV industry.

Jimmy Hunt, Spectrio

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 27, 2022 35:42

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Spectrio has been around the digital signage and on-premise media spaces for a bunch of years, growing both organically and through acquisitions, and increasingly making digital signage the main focus of the Tampa-area company. I've known of the company for a long time, but REALLY came to know some of its people in the past year, when we got into discussions about Sixteen:Nine being acquired by Spectrio. That happened, and this podcast and publication are now part of Spectrio. But my business partners have been fantastic about letting me continue to just do my thing, and make my own editorial decisions. I've wanted to do a podcast for a long, long time with Spectrio, way before this happened. We finally managed to make it work ... in a conversation here with Jimmy Hunt, who is the VP of Channel Sales for the company, working out of Dallas. We had a great conversation digging into how the company's partner channel was formalized last fall and how it now works for Spectrio. We also get into what Hunt and his people are seeing and hearing in the end-user and reseller marketplace, notably how customers are now tending to fully understand and value the importance of well-executed and relevant content. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Jimmy Hunt, thank you for joining me. Can you give me an idea of what your role is at Spectrio? Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. My role is VP, Channel Sales and Business Development. Specific to the channel or overall? Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, so my main focus is within the channel. I handle all of the indirect sales, so resellers, channel sales, the sales and the account management side, all roll up to me. Okay. So you're nurturing a ton of partners? Jimmy Hunt: A ton, yeah, and it's been very interesting to develop a good blend across media publishers, AV, IT, and the agency space. You've formally launched the reseller program back in November, but I'm guessing that you had resellers prior to that? Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, so I've been in the reseller space for about 15 years. My sole focus has been selling through the channel. Our methodology is pretty straightforward and simple. It's one-to-one-to-many. Previous to Spectrio, I focused mainly on the media and publisher world. So dealing with some of the largest media companies in the country across TV, radio, print, and digital. So we had a program in place yet, but it was great in Q3/Q4 to really formalize that and make it applicable to Spectrio moving forward, as well as the other industries, such as AV, IT, manufacturers, distributors, et cetera. How many partners do you have it at this point? Jimmy Hunt: So we are roughly over about 120. Prior to that announcement, we had about 60-65 meaningful partners. So we've doubled since then. It's been a busy Q4 and a busy Q1, but it's been great, really doubling down on the things that are working, and we've seen a lot of excitement across space. I was curious about your qualification of meaningful. I have seen lots of partner pages on websites of companies where I'm looking at their partners and thinking, "I wonder if they even really know each other?" Jimmy Hunt: That's a really good point. So for us, I always tell my team that we only win when our partners win. So if we're going to be a vendor and we're going to sit on the sideline, then expect for for that partnership to not be meaningful. So when I say meaningful, we really dig in with our partners. We try to position ourselves as true thought leaders to be consultants, to be advisors about our partnerships, but overall the space in general. We have to make sure that we can not only address the day to day, week to week, month to month, but also help steer our partners and educate them on what's happening in the industry, and a lot of times, it's really just connecting other partners together. Maybe it's a product or service that we may not even sell or be interested in, but if we know partner X over here does this very well, and they're good people, we like working with them, then we'll connect them with a partner Y. So this is a lot more than preferential pricing, or wholesale pricing, or whatever you want to call it. You're doing buddy-calling. You're doing support and training and all those sorts of things? Jimmy Hunt: Oh yeah. A 100 percent. Again, the only way we win is when our partners win. So we have to make sure that they understand the products and services from a training perspective, from a server's perspective and workflow perspective, really understanding again, from the very first conversation to delivery of signage or whatever the product may be, that we at least have a hand in that. And there's some partners that want us to be super hands on, have things white labeled, and there's some that say, “Hey, we're going to sharpen the spear. We just want you to support us.” The good thing about our leadership and the way we built the partner program is that we can cater to any type of scenario, right? So whether we're working with a global distributor or a local agency, we can find a way to dig in and be flexible and fluid to help their goals, and really it's at the end of the day it's understanding what benefits them, how can our product and services and moreover our partnership benefit our partner. And when you're doing that, there's obviously a lot of digital signage CMS and solutions options on the market. How do you distinguish what Spectrio brings to the table versus the other guys? Jimmy Hunt: It's three main things, especially in my role. Number one, it starts with that partnership. To be quite honest, when we're talking to new AV, IT resellers or anyone in the reseller space, we actually rarely lead with a product or service. We lead with our ability to be a good partner, and so everything you said earlier, all the training, all the collateral, certifications, et cetera. That's really what we lead with. And I've found that there's a lack of that partner support, partner management. So that means applying as an account executive on a particular partnership and everything under the sun there. I'd say secondly, what I'm listening to more and more is content. I think Spectrio is really primed right now to set ourselves apart by not just providing a great software and a great service through digital signage, but then taking it a step further and saying what's going to be on the screen and asking that simple question. Do you have a strategy to showcase the highest quality video content or static imagery possible? And sometimes it's, yes, we have a strategy, but a lot of times it's no, and they haven't even really thought about it. They may have an internal marketing team. They may have an agency. Doesn't really matter to us. We can again work and fit into their strategy. So we're finding right now, one of the biggest things that's setting Spectrio apart is our ability to produce video content for digital signage and really for the partner itself and their clients at scale. Dave, we're producing upwards of, I'd say 7,500 to 10,000 pieces of content a month for partners all over the world, and again, that's my background. A lot of the folks come from the reseller space at Spectrio, they come from digital signage background, but I come from a media and content background. So being able to blend those two has been really fun and really exciting, and I think third, to answer your question is, as you're aware, we've acquired a lot of different platforms, right? So now we have what we believe is the best in breed to say, okay this piece of this functionality really applies to this industry and this vertical with these types of clients versus just saying, Hey, we have one platform, use it or lose it. We can really customize our strategy and our solution to go across the board and help many different industries in many different verticals. Yeah, I'm guessing that's a bit of a challenge in that, through acquisition, you've acquired a number of CMS companies that have different variations on the same thing, and how you sort out which is best for each. It must be helpful to say, let's build this around content and not worry about features and specs so much. Let's think about what's the best platform for that need is? Jimmy Hunt: Exactly, and we have a lot of experience, first of all, for C-suite across the board is really specific and careful about who we're going after from an acquisition standpoint and they have made some really amazing choices, and allowing us to really highlight and compliment what we're doing today without being extremely disruptive and/or taking a 180. I would say, second, especially in my role in the Channel/BD world, it's really about leading the sales conversation with discovery, going back to that core value of what are your pain points, what are your roadblocks for you as a partner, but more specifically, and probably more importantly, for your clients, right? Whether it's working with the AV/IT reseller that focuses specifically in the finance category or whether it's a media company that has 25,000 automotive clients, it's really taking a step back and understanding how we can help you get from point A to point B and then from there that helps determine which platform and what pieces, and what pieces of the functionality we can apply to best help that partner. So who's doing the discovery? Because you could have salespeople and channel salespeople who have pipelines to fill, they've got quotas to hit and they don't necessarily think of themselves as content and strategy consultants. Jimmy Hunt: That's a great question. It's a unique blend between marketing, product and sales. Through some of our acquisitions, we've just obtained some of the absolute best, most brilliant brightest folks in the space, I'll speak about one specifically, Christian Armstrong came from Industry Weapon. Now he's been doing it for 16 years, and he manages our two largest partnerships, as well as our largest clients through those partnerships. So he has a unique role where he has taken on as a sales engineer as well as a product specialist role, and then we bring in our VP of Product who's just another wonderful hire from a couple of years ago, a guy named Brandon Mullins, who's just a genius. He runs all of our product and BD efforts. So having him really scope out from the get-go, “Okay this is something that is viable for the Spectrio. This is a good target”, and then really once we do that, we really try to capture that and productize it. Now, every partner industry's different, but although we are flexible, we still like to put things in a “box” and then scale. For me, it's all about scale and volume. So it's finding the partners that have a lot of endpoints, a lot of clients that we can then go after, and a partner and produce a high volume of revenue as well as endpoints. That's interesting because I would imagine some of the industry perception of Spectrio is, there's a company that's been growing through acquisition, they're acquiring IP and they're acquiring customers, but I don't know how many people think in terms of, they're acquiring human talent, as you just described. Jimmy Hunt: Yeah. So I think that's honestly one of my biggest missions this year is to get the Spectrio name and the vision and our methodology out in space. I think you're right, Spectrio is sometimes seen as a big or a growing company that's growing through acquisitions, and we are, obviously, but we have really focused on getting the right people, and I think that allows us to do both. Having Christian, having Brandon and some others as well on board allows us to grow the right way. Even the folks from the ABN acquisition, they are surprising me, and in a good way, every single week. Just how they went to market, obviously focusing on the automotive industry, but how they went to market was different from how Industry Weapon went to market and very different from how I went to market. But we're trying to find the commonalities both from a strategy standpoint, and then also finding the right people to take what they've done in the past, tweak it for a future focus and really grow the partnerships that way. What is the size of the company at this point? Jimmy Hunt: We're a little over 400 people and growing. We have a headquarters in Tampa. I'm based in Dallas, Texas, and we have people all over, but a big population in that Tampa, Miami, Florida region, as well as Charlotte, North Carolina. Oh, okay, and the Charlotte office, that was one of your acquisitions, going back 3-4 years, right? Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, the Charlotte offices mostly consist of sales, management and there's a handful of marketing folks there as well. Are you active in other countries? Jimmy Hunt: We are, yeah. So we are international, I would say a majority of our focus is US and Canada but we are active in other countries. It depends really on how we want to grow our international presence. It will be very specific and strategic and we'll most likely go through resellers and partners. Obviously, it's one of the easiest ways to get traction their fast. But there are, I guess there's 30 million plus SMEs or small to medium size businesses across the US so there's plenty to have here. But some of our acquisitions in Canada have been very interesting and allowed us to have a different perspective and to really see growth there, as well. Yeah, you bought Screenscape about a year and a half ago, two years? Jimmy Hunt: Correct. Yeah, and talking about a couple of guys that have stayed on. One of my top top sellers that stayed on lives in Canada and really took on that whole channel market himself and has just done very, very well. In terms of vertical markets, where are you guys seeing growth? Jimmy Hunt: So I'll start with my team, and then I'll talk about the Spectrio at large, but really from our focus, again, from the channel side, we're are targeting resellers and channel partners in three main categories, and so that's media and agency, TV, radio, print, digital, etc. Second and probably our largest and fastest growing is AV/IT. So that's where all the big players are and again, through the acquisitions, I would say we work with 60% to 70% of the top players in that space, but there's a whole bunch that we can also go after and then the third is an interesting mix, and these are more true partners than they are resellers, and that's every one from manufacturers of screens, mounts, et cetera. So think of Sony, LG, et cetera, all the way to a Brightsign and more of that player manufacturers. And those have been really interesting for me because it makes so much sense, right? If someone is out there securing deals and lots of endpoints selling their hardware, and they can have the conversation to say have you thought about a CMS provider? Have you thought about the software piece? That's where we've seen a lot of growth, and those partnerships were fun, right? Because like I said, it's less of a sale. It's more of a true value out of saying, okay, we have this 2,000 location retail chain that we're trying to chase, and we know that they need hardware, but they're also gonna need software. So let's introduce the Spectrio folks at the right time. So that's our chase from an industry perspective. From a vertical perspective, it's probably what you would imagine, it's healthcare, QSR, retail, automotive, higher education. For me, personally, higher ed has been super fun. I'm actually having a blast with that, just because I'm talking about an industry that could really use most of our services. You go on site to a big university or college campus. You can say their auditoriums and their stadiums and basketball arenas that have tons of screens that also need high quality content and as well as wayfinding capabilities for the campus itself. So it's been really fun trying to dig into that vertical more. They can be messy though, can't they? The higher ed, because you have individual schools that have their own IT departments. Jimmy Hunt: Oh my goodness, you're absolutely right. Not only that. It's the schools, it's also the athletic departments, and a lot of the build-outs of the various buildings and infrastructure are all different, right? As you know, you would have one part of the campus be renovated a year ago, and the other one hasn't been touched in 25 years. That's why having the product and sales engineers alongside with me pitching those types of clients has been crucial, and also just understanding what their needs are now versus what will be their needs in two or three years. There's been endless discussion about how the IT & AV worlds are converging and they ought to be best friends forever and so on. I would say it's only been in the last couple of years when you've really started to see that happen. I was intrigued by Diversified bringing on a new CEO and their founder is not stepping away at all, he's going to be very reactive, but much more mentoring, but their new CEO comes out of IT Services. So they absolutely see where the future is. Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, so without having specific details on why they did that, I think overall, that is going to be the trend we're going to see, and it's not just IT. I think you could slot in content there. I would not be surprised if there's some big changes in the C-suite across the various resellers, bringing in people that have strong content backgrounds as well as IT, I think we're going to see more of a blend, right? We're getting to the position where it's almost annoying, I can't go anywhere without looking at screens, and I was in the airport yesterday. I probably sat in and it was technically my day off. I was visiting my family in DC and my team was like, please stop texting us. But I was in the airport just taking videos at the bar, at the restaurant or in the Concourse and all these different types of functionality and services and I think it's becoming so apparent and just consumptions and consumer behavior is really going to help drive this blend of, okay, AV actually needs more of a lock step with IT as well as content. So I'm not surprised by that move at all, and I think it's probably gonna work very well for them. Yeah. It's interesting that in the last little bit, I haven't seen anybody stand up at a conference or publish something that says, “content is king”, which was an eye-roller for a whole bunch of time. But now it seems to be baked in there that people get it, that this is not about the screens, it's not about the software. It's about what's on the display and you've got to get that right. Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, David, I think that's absolutely right. I would even take it a step further. I think a lot of times, what I'm hearing is it's all about what's on the screen, but moreover, what story can you tell? And that kind of goes back to the “Mad Men” days of advertising, what story are you going to help that brand tell? It's actually really fun and exciting to see. You could see it come full circle with a new type of media, right? Signage is relatively new. I know it's not new, per se, but in terms of TV and radio, I think digital signage on site is a little bit different, and I think it's been really refreshing to hear people across the board, whether it's this type of industry or that, saying what story can you help us tell? Because, in my opinion, I think that is the real value. Because it's not just pushing an ad, it's not just having a menu board. It's what story can you tell, which will then inflict some type of behavior or feeling for the consumers, and if we do that well, then you're going to see all the good things such as higher retention rates, probably higher sales at point of sale, et cetera. When you're talking to particularly the IT Services people who lead with that sort of thing, what are the questions they're asking and how are they sorting through who they want to partner with? Because I'm guessing things like security come up as being quite important to them. Jimmy Hunt: Oh, so I would say security is number one. I would say scale and not just scale within, again, there's scale in a campus. There's also, if it's a multi location franchise that has locations all over the world or all over the country, can you reproduce this in 500 different cities? I think that in itself is a challenge. I think the installation piece and the survey piece is super important. Again, going back to the infrastructure of how something is built, whether it's a a financial service, it's going to be different than a college campus and that will be different than an attorney's office. So having the ability to not just be pigeonholed to one vertical is super important for us. And do you have to, particular running channels, be careful about how you are establishing what your lane is and how you stay in it? Because there are lots of software and solutions companies out there who describe what they do as turnkey. “We can do the deployment, we can do the framing and consulting. We can do whatever you need us to do.” But if you have partners, that's what they want they do. Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, I guess that's been one of the positive challenges and roadblocks that we've had with growth. We start to have a little bit of growth in a particular industry or vertical with a certain reseller type, then you want to pursue that, but it all has to run in parallel to the overall goals, objective of Spectrio. So I would say, outside of my world, we're pretty aligned and locked in. I would say with the channel and the resellers, first and foremost, we will always want to lead with being a software company. We want to provide the best CMS. But I think to your point, understanding where we can be flexible and be more fluid with particular partner requests or types, and it could be anything from, how we receive the orders. It can be that simple. It could be, “Hey, we have a certain CRM or some type of software tool that we use to capture orders and send out orders or, billing, et cetera.” But it's being very careful about how we move forward. I think, again, that when we first started the channel partner program officially in Q3, we still have more of a shotgun approach, and that was purposeful. That was a strategy that I wanted to pursue at first, just make sure I was covering all my bases to understand that we didn't leave anything out, and from then that focus has been more and more narrow. So now we are hyper-focused on providing the best partnership experience to AV/IT, media and agencies, as well as those hardware providers. Spectrio started out as doing stuff like music on hold, when people used landline phones and things like that, and in-store music, all those sorts of things, and those still exist within the company. Are they helpful in rounding out the offer for some of the jobs to try to do particularly in retail? Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, absolutely. So I'll answer that in two ways. First a 100 percent, we were started as this in-store on-hold music and messaging company and that allowed us to scale and scale quickly, and then it is still a really big part of our business today, especially when COVID hit it was hard for us to pick up the phone and try to sell signage when a lot of locations were closed, but there were certain products and services such as the on-hold that went through the roof, and it was because everyone was picking up the phone and trying to figure out if their local pharmacy was open or if their favorite restaurant had changed business hours, and people really trying to take advantage of that, saying, "Okay this is one way that we can actually continue to communicate, update our clients with some type of messaging." But then I think now, to your point, yes, a 100 percent, if we can offer a more holistic solution, a full suite of services to our partners and to their clients, we absolutely do and I think taking a look at the broader partner world, the ones that are consuming multiple products are the ones that are staying longer, that have lower churn, that have higher ASP, that have higher overall MRR with us, and it just makes sense again, and that kind of goes back to how we started this. Let's start the conversation with discovery. Let's understand what the pain points are and though signage may be the sharp end of the spear, what typically happens if we're being a good partner, if we're providing that training and collateral, not just sometimes, but all of our products and services. At some point, I bet we'll have a shot at selling in music or selling in content or selling in WiFi. That's been a charge from day one is let's win the business with what makes the most sense, which is 99% of the time signage. But also having the ability to go, what are you doing for music? And isn't that a pain point, and then really trying to find the commonalities between our products and services. Yeah, and I assume your resellers and your end user customers are happy as clams if they ask that question, can you do in-store audio too and you say, yeah, we can, because if you don't, they have to go out and find another vendor. Jimmy Hunt: Oh, yeah. You're a 100 percent correct there and it's been interesting talking to some of these some of the leaders in the space. Most of our conversations is around signage, but it's always interesting to see their perspective and to hear their delight saying, hey, obviously we're going to keep the conversations around players and signage, but oh, by the way this client or reseller is asking about music, can you also provide? And from my perspective, again, it goes back to being a good partner, but what it does for our partners is it allows them product and vendor consolidation, which sounds just like a simple thing on paper, but it's really not because every vendor a partner brings on, that's typically another individual, another workflow, another billing unit, another escalation point, and so if we can help our resellers and their clients consolidate their vendors, that's sometimes is enough just to win the business. Then obviously the second thing that we really lean on in terms of multiple products and services is product diversification. So again, partnering with Spectrio allows, let's say just a typical AV/IT reseller to go, okay we can give you a signage, we can give you software. But now we can also provide you with music. We can now also provide you with content, and that was a big play for me in the media space, because you think others in the space, they started obviously selling just radio, just TV, just print, but over the years have gone digital and, having that digital component can encompass a lot of different things. So having us provide one or multiple products or services allows our partners just an easier path to success. Last question: we're now starting to do trade shows again. Finally, I've actually got airplane tickets to a trade show for the first time in two-plus years. Where will people in the signage industry be able to find you guys in the next few months? Jimmy Hunt: We've been very active. Again, it's been a challenge across the industry. I think people are starting to get more and more in tune and okay with getting back on the road, rightfully so. It was a devastating, challenging time for everyone and every single industry for two years, and it still is. So we've been super-active. I would say future focus, we will be at DSE. We'll be at InfoComm, and then we are in the very near term, there's a media event out in LA called Localogy, and I'll be speaking on that. I'll be speaking on a panel about content and digital signage and how to bridge the gap between the two, and it's interesting, that is typically a media publisher conference, but we've actually invited a lot of our friends over at Sony and Brightsign. My selfish goal is to help blend these two industries saying, these are some of the largest media companies in the world, and I selfishly want them to be in tune with digital signage, and here are some of the brightest and sharpest individuals in the AV/IT digital signage space, let's actually step out and blend the two. So I'm very excited about that. We'll have a presence at several more, but I'd say InfoComm, DSE and Localogy are the three that we're going to really double down on and we hope to see everyone there. Absolutely. All right, Jimmy, thank you so much for taking some time with me. Jimmy Hunt: Dave, thank you so much. This has been great. Being a fan of it for so long and now hopping onboard has been great.

covid-19 tv ceo texas canada miami dc north carolina product sony hunt tampa wifi ip business development previous crm av mad men lg bd cms smes diversified asp mrr signage qsr abn it services channel sales concourse dse infocomm jimmy hunt av it brightsign

IT Factor 52: Hacking The Human

cybersecurity factor hacking av it

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 1, 2022

Discussing the human element of cybersecurity threats and what IT managers need to be aware of when protecting your systems.

IT Factor 52: Hacking The Human

cybersecurity factor hacking av it

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 1, 2022 34:08

Discussing the human element of cybersecurity threats and what IT managers need to be aware of when protecting your systems. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

IT Factor 52: Hacking The Human