Podcasts about cmss

The Web Agency Summit is a free event from April 7-11, 2025, focusing on web development, offering insights into AI, SEO, and networking opportunities for professionals across platforms and CMSs.

Kirby Retzer began his career with the Boston Red Sox Strength and Conditioning staff as a college intern in 2013. Upon graduation from the Exercise Science program at Florida Gulf Coast University, he was hired by the Minnesota Twins where he oversaw their rookie-level operations and injury rehabilitation programs for two seasons. Then, from 2016 to 2023, Kirby returned to the Red Sox and held 4 different leadership positions throughout his 8 seasons with the team. During his tenure with the Red Sox, he earned a Master's degree in Kinesiology with an emphasis on Orthopedic Rehabilitation and studied to become a Certified Muscle Systems Specialist. Kirby has been able to prolong the careers of present Major League players and develop some of the young rising stars in the game today. He left the Red Sox organization to spend more time with his family and work with Symmetry.Topics covered in this episode:-Discussing life during and after professional baseball-Maximizing impact as a Strength and Conditioning Coach-Continuing Education ResourcesQuotes:-"The principles apply to everybody really" (9:45)-"I want to provide really good evidence-based information layered within experience to help people, and I think that that's probably the way that I want to 'get back' to the game" (23:13)-"Obviously biased right here, but the CMSS stuff, the Certified Muscle Systems Specialist, is the best thing I've found" (31:11)If you'd like to learn more from Kirby, you can find him on social media:Instagram:@kirbyretzeror Kirby can be reached at:Kirby@SymmetryExerciseClinic.com

This week we're joined by Simen Svale, the co-founder and CTO of Sanity.io Sanity is a content management system that's built for developers, and it's a great alternative to traditional CMSs like WordPress. Sanity focuses on developer experience, and it's a great choice for building modern, scalable content-driven applications.https://sanity.iohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/simenss/?originalSubdomain=nohttps://x.com/svaleBecome a paid subscriber our patreon, spotify, or apple podcasts for the ad-free episode.https://www.patreon.com/devtoolsfmhttps://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/devtoolsfm/subscribehttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/devtools-fm/id1566647758https://www.youtube.com/@devtoolsfm/membership

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

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

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

How much power should you give your clients and non-tech colleagues? In this episode, Matt and Mike explore the evolving landscape of web development tools and workflows, inspired by Webflow's new page and component slots. They discuss how these innovations, along with popular page builders and CMSs, are empowering non-tech staff to take on more responsibilities, reducing developer involvement in day-to-day content updates. However, this shift comes with risks like design inconsistency, security vulnerabilities, and technical debt. The duo also examines the future of page editing, from AI-driven templates to voice-activated tools and automated quality checks, highlighting the balance between empowering editors and maintaining developer oversight. Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/are-developers-making-page-builders-too-powerful-for-content-editors Thanks to Magic Mind for sponsoring this episode, enjoy 20% off one-time purchases and subscription using our link and code (Link: https://magicmind.com/HTMLPOD20 Code: HTMLPOD20) Thanks to Wix Studio for sponsoring this episode! Check out Wix Studio, the web platform tailored to designers, developers, and marketers via this link: https://www.wix.com/studio  

In this episode Andrew tries to pick a CMS for the new MetaMonster website and talks about his dream solution. Then the guys talk about their ideal consulting businesses. Meanwhile Sean is feeling frustrated by how slow his projects are moving, and wishes he could focus on them fulltime for a bit. They also touch on the difficulties of balancing attention to design details versus just getting a product out the door quickly. Finally, Sean shares 3 businesses he loves. Links:Andrew's Twitter: @AndrewAskinsAndrew's website: https://www.andrewaskins.com/MetaMonster: https://metamonster.ai/ChartJuice: https://www.chartjuice.com/Sean's Twitter: @seanqsunMiscreants: http://miscreants.com/StackWise: Coming soon...FigTree: Coming soon...For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.Transcript:00:00:00.01SeanUh, yeah, I mean, I was going to talk about, well, I should have your record.00:00:05.81AndrewDo you want to start over?00:00:07.50SeanNo, it just let's just roll with it. Hi, everyone.00:00:10.80AndrewHi, how's it going? Behind the scenes look at Andrew and Sean being a bit of a clusterfuck trying to figure out what the hell the pod about 30 seconds before the pod or five seconds after the pod.00:00:12.65SeanGood.00:00:20.21SeanWe're very organized or we're incredibly organized. think, I think it's a good segue into, into like, we can talk about like other service business and I have a segue into it because I was kind of curious about just how your consulting is sort of going now that.00:00:34.65AndrewOkay.00:00:35.35SeanYeah. but more importantly, some crazy, crazy, crazy tech Twitter stuff going on these days, huh?00:00:42.87AndrewOh, so when i when I said I wanted to talk about CMSs, yeah the WordPress drama, I feel like we covered a little bit last time.00:00:42.94SeanSince the last.00:00:49.11SeanYeah.00:00:49.88AndrewThere's more updates. it's It keeps getting wackier.00:00:53.21SeanMm hmm.00:00:53.72AndrewThe WordPress founder took over a plugin, which is batshit crazy.00:00:59.63SeanYeah, I was just going to go from crazy batshit WordPress things into maybe Ghost and then CMS's house imagining.00:01:08.50AndrewUh, sorry, I totally fucked your, your segue there.00:01:09.97SeanNo.00:01:13.12Andrewyeah, anyway, I need to build a website and I'm trying to pick a CMS and I want you to, to I want you to tell me which CMS to use and I'm gonna, I'm gonna like ignore you and tell you why you're wrong on every CMS.00:01:22.11Seansquarepace Okay.00:01:26.46AndrewLike, because they all suck.00:01:26.71SeanOkay. Hit me. Hit me. They do all suck, but hit me.00:01:31.00AndrewOkay. So I think I have it narrowed down. I wanted to use, so I'm trying to build a proper marketing site for MetaMonster so that I can get a little bit of SEO stuff rolling and then publish some content and just like have a place to do marketing.00:01:51.26Andrewum want to build some free tools, want to do some other things to just start building building the list, our waiting list.00:01:54.30SeanYeah.00:01:59.89AndrewSo need to pick a CMS. would typically just build on Webflow. Like Webflow is so fast. It's what I built chart juice on. It's clunky, it's expensive, it has its problems. The CMS sucks if you're doing a lot of content, but for like early stage SaaS website, I don't know many things better. So would typically just do Webflow. But I know one of the marketing channels I wanna try is building00:02:32.68Andrewsome free tools to try to drive, get like SEO juice from, from free tools and like some traffic. it just aligns perfectly with MetaMonster, you know, having a free like, enter a link or copy and paste your content in and we'll generate a page title for you. We'll generate a meta description for you. Like it just makes too much sense. Um, and sorry, one second. Let me let my cat in.00:02:57.67Seangot00:02:58.58AndrewCome on in you dork.00:03:01.38AndrewOkay. So yeah, I want to build free tools and like.00:03:03.43SeanYou want to build free tools. It's great. It isn't a monster.00:03:08.40AndrewThe process of doing that in Webflow is just clunky. I could yeah know i could build them, host them on some free thing like Netlify, and then just like run them on a subdomain.00:03:19.66AndrewBut you know if the whole point is SEO, then running it on a subdomain is a little counterproductive. you know It's not the worst thing in the world, I guess, but you're just like, do they now?00:03:28.86Seandoes it you I thought subdomains count as the main domains. like Yeah, I thought that was the whole thing.00:03:38.16AndrewI feel, oh, okay, I need to look into that. Cause that would massively simplify my my problems.00:03:44.34Seanright00:03:46.07AndrewI always thought like best practice was to do everything on your primary domain and that like subdomains got treated differently.00:03:52.10SeanI thought that00:03:56.09AndrewYou're looking it up.00:03:57.51SeanYeah, I'm looking it up. I feel like it was something.00:04:01.40AndrewThere was a Google update, like in this, one of these new big updates, they they started00:04:02.81SeanYeah.00:04:06.13SeanYeah.00:04:07.62AndrewMashing it all together.00:04:08.89SeanYeah. I mean, Ahrefs literally pulls shop.mistreins.com and mistreins.com into one thing now for me.00:04:16.03AndrewInteresting.00:04:16.97SeanSo. I don't know. Yea...

In this episode Karim and DXP expert Dan Drapeau discuss procurement challenges, monolithic vs. composable solutions, TCO, the role of agencies, and strategic roadmapping.

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

Host Dr. Lawrence Kosinski is joined by Helen Burstin, MD, MPH, MACP – the Chief Executive Officer of the Council of Medical Specialty Societies which represents 45-member specialty societies with collective membership of almost 800,000 U.S. physician members. CMSS works to support and strengthen specialty societies and catalyzes improvement through convening, collaboration, collective voice and action. CMSS provides a proactive platform to assess and address emerging and critical issues across specialty societies that influence the future of healthcare and the patients they serve. To stream our Station live 24/7 visit www.HealthcareNOWRadio.com or ask your Smart Device to “….Play Healthcare NOW Radio”. Find all of our network podcasts on your favorite podcast platforms and be sure to subscribe and like us. Learn more at www.healthcarenowradio.com/listen

The CMS landscape has evolved a lot over the past couple of decades. Recently, headless CMSs and decoupled content architectures have appeared to address the need for omnichannel content experiences. While their separation of the management of content from its presentation offers many benefits, these systems have left many users dissatisfied and disillusioned. Preston So argues that the solution to this situation is universal CMS. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/preston-so-3/

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

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

Sponsors: This episode is sponsored by Optmyzr, ⁠⁠⁠go to optmyzr.com to start your two-week free trial today.⁠⁠⁠ This episode is also sponsored by AlsoAsked. ⁠⁠⁠Go to alsoasked.com to get the best way to access People Also Ask data for your keywords.⁠⁠⁠ Show notes: Matt Tutt joins Search With Candour this week to discuss how to make the web more sustainable: The resources required for data centres How easy it is to use green web hosting Reducing image sizes Reducing crawl budgets Should we have a universal crawler? Putting pressure on CMSs to use renewable energy sources Resources: Matt's climate change +SEO survey for Search Engine Land: ⁠https://searchengineland.com/climate-change-seo-survey-making-web-more-sustainable-438209⁠ The Green Web Foundation: https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/ https://www.websitecarbon.com/ https://lowwwcarbon.com/  Michelle Barker - A greener web: https://youtu.be/EfPoOt7T5lg?si=o7Dn16CkBsaokIu9

In health systems, many organizations are rightfully starting to consider the evolution of their website CMS to a Digital Experience Platform (DFP) - but what does that mean? In this episode, hosts Reed Smith and Chris Boyer clarify what a DXP is, including discussing differences between DXPs and CMSs and how websites are begin to evolve to meet the needs of modern digital experiences. John Berndt from Valtech joins to discuss his perspective on DXPs and how adopting a composability framework, while more complicated, can provide significant value to an organization.  Mentions from the show:  What is a Digital Experience Platform? The difference between a CMS and a DXP The Evolution of Content Management Systems (CMSs) to Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) John Berndt on LinkedIn Valtech.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

In this episode of Cutting Edge: Web Content Development, host Jonathan Ames is joined by Karen McGrane and Jeff Eaton, Partners at Autogram. Join them as they delve into page builders, exploring the challenges of overusing them, how teams can effectively mitigate their problem points, and where the onus on using them efficiently lies. They further weigh in on some tactical insights, including building websites from a mobile perspective first.

In this OmnichannelX podcast episode, host Noz Urbina sits down with Tony Byrne, Founder of Real Story Group (formerly CMS Watch). Tony brings over two decades of expertise in CMSs, offering unique perspectives on the evolution of DAMs, headless CMS, and the emerging role of AI in content strategy. This episode delves into the complexities of modern content technologies and offers insightful strategies for making informed choices in a rapidly changing digital landscape.   By the end of the episode, you'll learn: Evolution of Content Management Systems: Understand how DAMs and CMS have evolved over the years, including the rise of headless CMS and the impact of AI Strategic Technology Decisions: Learn the importance of having a clear strategy and vision when choosing content management technologies The Future of DAMs: Explore how DAMs are expanding their capabilities, managing a wider range of assets, and playing a crucial role in the content lifecycle The Role of AI in Content Strategy: Gain insights into how AI is transforming content creation and management, not just at the customer touchpoint but throughout the content lifecycle Challenges with Headless CMS: Understand the limitations and potential pitfalls of headless CMS and the importance of hybrid solutions Emerging Omni-channel Content Platforms: Discover the concept of Omni-channel Content Platforms (OCPs) and how they differ from traditional DAM and CMS solutions Making Informed Technology Choices: Learn practical tips for navigating the complex content technology market and making decisions that align with your organization's needs.

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

In this episode of Cutting Edge: Web Content Development, host Jonathan Ames is joined by Paul Seal, Umbraco Tech Lead at ClerksWell. Join them as they discuss optimizing editor experiences in CMSs, delving into why it's important, what makes a good experience, and how to measure the success of optimization efforts.

The arrival of decoupled content architectures and headless CMSs creates a new set of challenges for content modelers, authors, administrators, and others who work with content systems. Lo Etheredge does developer relations for Hygraph, a headless CMS company. Dev rel folks don't typically drive organizational change and stakeholder alignment, but Lo's unique background in social work uniquely prepares them to help customers with the human side of content management. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/lo-etheridge/

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Jason Ault was working in the traditional sign business back in the late 2000s when a customer contract came along that required a digital sign. He had an IT background, so he stuck up his hand and took it on. He caught the bug, so to speak, and has been in digital signage ever since - putting together an initial team that launched in 2010 as Coffman Media. The Columbus, Ohio-based solutions provider has found a niche in the middle of buying market - not the little guys who can't offer much scale, and not the Fortune 500s that are going to opt for a national integrator, major software firm or even a giant consulting firm. Coffman is particularly active providing a solution, plan and services in workplaces and in regional and mid-sized QSRs, notably coffee chains. Jason and I chat on this podcast about its services, how the marketplace and needs have evolved, the gulf that still exists between conventional and digital sign companies, and the steady need for educating end-users. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jason, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me a bit about Coffman Media and your role there?  Jason Ault: Absolutely. Coffman Media is a digital signage integration firm that we started almost 14 years ago and I am the co-founder and chief operating officer. You guys are in the Columbus, Ohio area and then down in Jacksonville as well?  Jason Ault: That's correct. We just opened the Jacksonville office just over a year ago. But servicing customers all across the US, Canada, and Mexico.  How did you get into it?  Jason Ault: Back in 2008, I was with a traditional sign company, and we were doing a big mall redevelopment project, and some of that scope called for digital signage and back then, my background was computer information, so we decided to say yes to that part of the scope as well. Took it on, partnered with CoolSign way back then before Haivision acquired it and really caught a bug for the industry, started formulating a team that we wanted to put together, and launched the shingle of Coffman Media in February of 2013. It's interesting, that the traditional printing industry seems like this is something that they have to go towards and evolve into, and while we've seen some of it, it still seems like an industry that's not really made the jump or evolved into it. Jason Ault: I absolutely agree, and we see the same thing as well. Just knowing that industry, from my previous life and also working with a lot of traditional sign companies, it is a struggle for them to get into because it does require some computer skills and some networking skills. Obviously, they may have some content chops and metal fabrication chops, but they still need that networking and computer element.  Is that something that you guys help out on?  Jason Ault: Absolutely, everything from traditional sign companies to managed service providers, because they don't know the signage side, even they don't know the IT side, architects, really anyone trying to get into digital signage side, we can help them in pre-sales support, demos from CMS partners that we have, training up their clients, passing it off, supporting their clients, really however far they want us to go into the weeds with them, we can help them out.  So you start all the way at the ideation stage with some customers and can take them all the way through managed services? Jason Ault: Absolutely. It depends on where they want to jump off and take over. We can come in under their banner; we can come in as partners with our logo. This depends on how they want to present us as a partner to the end customer. It's interesting because the digital signage market, particularly the software companies tends to present their products as being very easy to use, and very intuitive. They spend a lot of time explaining use cases and everything else but still seems to be a big leap for traditional companies who don't think about this stuff sometimes. Why is that? Jason Ault: At the surface level, we are right in some aspects, it is easy to use but as digital signage use is evolving, content is getting dynamic. People want to integrate into data that's living out on the web somewhere or integrating into a point of sale or a plethora of other things that you can plug into. That's where things get lost and they need someone to come in and help tie all those things together. I refer to companies such as yours as solutions providers as opposed to integrators, which sounds like an arms and legs hang and bang situation. Is that a term that fits? Jason Ault: Yeah, at the end of the day, we are a solution provider. We live on both sides of the world, but at the end of the day, we're always starting with the end in mind, working backward, and figuring out what solution fits that customer's needs. We're not just one CMS partner shop. We're not just one hardware shop. It really is what fits customers' needs the best. And so you don't have your own software, you don't have proprietary hardware or anything else, so you're able to just look at a job and figure out, okay, based on what Mr. Customer's tell us, here's what we'd recommend.  Jason Ault: Exactly. We've got three core CMS partners that we've formulated over the years with Signage Live being our longest tenure at 13 years running, and then hardware runs the gambit to whatever that platform supports, and then we pick from that bucket.  So, why would you have three software partners? Jason Ault: This depends on the customer. Sometimes a need is going to lean towards their benefit more. So if we need a native POS integration, we can look to engage Spectrio. If we need a lot of data binding, we can look at Wallboard, but our largest partner is really Signage Live because they approach it from an API-first headless perspective so we can do a lot of unique things with them and we developed really great projects over the years, so that's the standpoint but again the need is justifying the partner that we bring to the table for that total solution.  That's interesting. I obviously have a relationship with Spectrio and know their product very well because of the ownership position. But the Signage Live component when Jason Cremins, the CEO of Signage Live, told me three years ago now, that he was going down the path of headless CMS, it was early days for that, and I had to ask him to tell me what that is and he did, and I thought I could see the marketplace moving towards this thing just because of the flexibility that it presents. Is that what you found?  Jason Ault: It is, and then it correlates to what came out and the Invictus reports last year or this year, I can't remember which one it was, where it's talking about the new wave of architecture that's gonna have to come down the pike for CMSs partners and that's really where I think Signage Live was a little bit ahead of the curve and had already gone down that path of headless API first and how they were going to market three years ago. Yeah, I think Stefan from Invictus describes it as the old style is very monolithic, and the new style is composable, where you can come at it from different angles and inject content and make things happen. Plus, you can use your own tools.  Jason Ault: Exactly.  Have you found over 14 years that customer needs have evolved? Jason Ault: A hundred percent. I'd say 30% of our business this year will be Gen 2, and Gen 3 digital signage partner relationships for us. And it's not because they were unhappy necessarily with their partner, but the infrastructure or solution that they had in place for however many years, it'd be no longer able to suit their needs. Everything from being able to ingest outside content in unique ways, supporting new hardware that has security measures being able to pass all these, security requirements now. So everything is secure from the customer's standpoint. Those kinds of things are changing quite rapidly.  Yeah, and you're sitting up above this. I'm very curious because you have your software partner, and I'm sure you spend a lot of time looking at everything that's out there. I'm curious, if you find that a lot of software companies are stuck in their lane and don't have the mechanism to expand and make what they have more open. Jason Ault: Yeah, I think it's absolutely true. Whether it comes down to how it's built or just where they're in the market and they can't really move past it. They do have their niche and that's just where they stay. That's where I think we have three great tools in our tool belt that can handle pretty much anything thrown at us, from a unique perspective one of mail digital signage to something that's experiential. I talk to companies a lot about the importance of identifying the marketplace understanding, what you do, and what you're particularly good at versus general offers.  As a solutions provider, have you started to focus on particular vertical markets, or is it somewhat generalized?  Jason Ault: We're starting to focus really in the last 12 months, and that's really between corporate communication and quick service restaurants. We had some really great wins in each of those sectors and found our identity in those, but that's still not to say that we won't serve other opportunities that come to our direction either through partners or just by knocking on the door. Those are two incredibly competitive markets to go after. How do you set yourself apart? Jason Ault: It's a great question. In a way, it's hyper-competitive. So, we are not necessarily fishing for the whales or maybe not even the tunas, but in that mid-market space, someone with 100 locations, or maybe they're just coming up to that three-digit all the way to approaching the four-digit mark, we really found a nice little lane where we can help them out from setting up what a total solution should look like, rolling it out and being that consultative arm for them, vverything from clearance bars through headsets to digital signage, really every piece and stack that could be around that whole ecosystem, and we're bringing it together as one package. That's where we're setting ourselves apart from and then serving that kind of middle market.  Yeah, I suspect when you talk about the whale accounts in QSR and even in Fortune 500 companies for workplace communication, the large ones are not as price-sensitive. They're somewhat conditioned to working with big consulting companies and just large service providers versus, as you described, the regional ice cream chain or whatever where those kinds of companies come in to see them. They're looking at them like, you want two extra zeros from us, and that isn't going to happen. Jason Ault: Exactly. A lot of the time, those mid-market franchise orders are struggling with the balance of how do I either roll this into the total package for new stores or they want us to deal with the franchisees directly, and a lot of times, that can be very cumbersome for an organization, but we take that on, and yes, it comes with our own licks, shut doors and we don't get paid, or we are served bankruptcy papers but we've been able to make some wins at it.  We are hyper-focused within the QSRs side, and we found a home with coffee chains, I don't know how they fell in, but it just started to snowball. I think it's one of those cases where they don't quite understand what they're asking for and why they need it, but if they can see an example of another chain that they compete with or are familiar with, they can see, okay, this is what they did so yeah, we want that too.  Jason Ault: It's kind of a way of Keeping up with the Joneses' aspect, and that's where we're able to show them, here's the package that we do, obviously skewed for their particular organization, but helping them along the way, getting them familiar with understanding what they're asking for and then making sure that the value is perceived from the dollar they are spending. The pandemic and the lockdown compelled QSR, in particular, to start looking more at this because maybe they had to do drive-through, which they didn't do in the past, and they had to do self-service kiosks because staffing became an issue.  Jason Ault: It did, and it didn't. We actually had a couple of partners that reverted away from digital because they were now just doing takeout as more on the piece of the side where they were having dine-in. They just realized that it's not going to change. They're doing a lot more just from the mobile pickup delivery, that kind of aspect. But then, on the other flip side of more traditional quick-service, absolutely, really force them into thinking how we can work better in the current market? And then that's just propelling it forward three years later. I still see pretty substantial QSR chains out there that have issues with what's on the display and that they're not integrated fully or properly with their restaurant management system. So they're doing things like putting stickers over the top of items that aren't available or wrestling with them, do I stroke something out on the screen, or do I make it disappear?  Are those things pretty elemental? Jason Ault: It is, and it is a struggle, and seems to me, the larger the organization is, the less process there is in order to ensure that screens are operated in the correct fashion. We see it all the time, whether it's a drive through which I'm personally going through or one we're trying to win the business up. You can set things in motion, and one of them starts with integration and giving some autonomy for people to fix the screen. That way, your corporation does not necessarily have to be the big brother that's managing everything.  There are roadblocks to put in place to stop those things from happening. Physical tape is a little bit harder unless we shock somebody when they touch it, but there are ways to put those stops in place. When you're dealing with the small regional to mid-size chains, is it more challenging technically because maybe they're not standardized on restaurant management systems, point of sale systems, that sort of thing? Jason Ault: It's a little challenging. One thing that we try to do is bring in partners if that is the case. Talking with point-of-sale companies, they don't necessarily go that route, but at least we can bring in some people to help in that scenario. We do like to at least have them unified on point of sale, so we're doing only some kinds of integrations, but it is a struggle for sure.  Even a chain of a hundred stores we're currently working with, they've got two or three points of sales because some people are still on legacy contracts and things like that, and we just have to work with those as they pop up. Do you have to spend a lot of time educating franchise owners that this is why you want to do this, because they really don't wanna drop $15,000 on a drive-through display? Jason Ault: Hundred percent. Pretty much every partner who a customer, whom we are aligned with, at their annual conventions talking, teaching, and explaining the value, because we just had one that was doing dual lane drive-through, and that obviously doubled the cost.  They went static rather than digital. They just didn't see the extra value of spending the 50 grand to do all of that. So, it still needs to improve the current partners that we have today.  I'm curious about the workplace side where you're seeing traction. Like how is it being used? Jason Ault: That's a great question. We do a lot of manufacturing right on the plant floor. Keeping those folks up to speed on what's going on, and then we're also doing a lot of just traditional workplace communication, between multi-sites and multi-silos within the organization just to generalize workplace communication. Still, manufacturing has had a pretty big uptick. Everything from screens down at the machine level to doing some video walls on the plant floor that everyone can see with some workplace KPIs and things like that to get some real-time information to the floor folks.  Yeah, that's always struck me as more useful in many respects than white-collar environments like offices because there are typically ways to communicate to people all the way down to the level of a manager walking out and talking to somebody, but when you're in a desk-less environment, and you've got a whole bunch of workers who maybe don't even have English as a first language, how do you reach these people? How do you tell people what's going on? How do you motivate them? All those things.  So it's encouraging to see that now, really starting to get some traction. Jason Ault: Yeah, absolutely, and we're also seeing a couple of the real estate players that are in the commercial side, taking a look at putting in digital signage as part of these packages to make it an entire scene for someone coming into renting the warehouse for the manufacturing business. So, it is just part of their infrastructure?  Jason Ault: Exactly. So it's, “Hey, this is why you should choose me over the competitor's space. We have this great infrastructure”, and then when that tenant leaves, they can wipe it all clean and have it ready for the next person. Do you have to future-proof those sorts of things? Because if there are tenants and they sign a five-year lease, and somebody else comes in, are the screens still in the right place, or maybe a five-year window is enough, and you don't worry about that?  Jason Ault: I don't know if we can have the right data for that. We've only been doing it for about two and a half years in that space. We're keeping it at a five-year warranty window for those particular devices going in once a year, doing some maintenance, doing some checks on those particular locations. But time will tell as the next two-and-a-half-year cycle comes up on what we have our hands on. I'm curious about very elemental digital signage in office environments. I've got another press release today from a CMS company that's integrated with a video streaming platform. This one's with Zoom, but I've seen at least three companies integrating with Microsoft Teams. The idea is that you can use the video conferencing collaboration displays in meeting rooms as digital signage screensavers. But it strikes me as interesting, but awfully elemental, and what does that really accomplish?  Do you fight with that at all?  Jason Ault: We don't necessarily fight with that. We have some CMS partners that can do that with the Mersive solstice pods, with the Barco click shares, and turn it into some digital signage when that is not in use for the huddle rooms or the conference rooms. But it's not been a huge adoption, at least from our book of clients. Yeah, it just hits me, and some of it, I suspect, is probably pretty good, particularly those that started with a full-throated digital signage, CMS. But some of the particular ones that the companies like, maybe Mersive, I have yet to see their stuff, but I assume it's pretty basic. I wonder if it's if the end user customers look at it and go, that's all we need. Jason Ault: In those situations, even when we're doing the ones with Barco click share and putting signage live on those devices, when it's not in use for its screen sharing capability, they have the full-fledged option to treat it as a traditional screen. But, sometimes, these are in huddle rooms with a door that may not be open. I wouldn't put, “Hey, there's a fire alarm going on”, because someone may not be in there. So, in our opinion, an odd industry because those rooms were not in use. Are they ever seen? It really depends on the client. We have a client, Washington Prime Group, here in Columbus, Ohio, that has glass conference rooms and huddle rooms, and it makes sense for them because everyone can see as you walk through, and it's above the privacy shelf. Yeah, I was curious about an announcement by Mersive. They were going into a whole bunch of WeWork co-working locations, and I thought what they were doing was interesting because it's probably quite elemental, but their whole business rationale is they've got sensors that recognize that somebody's coming into the room, and when that happens, the screen goes on and says, hey, you need to book this, or have you booked this? If not, it needs to be booked; get the hell out. It didn't say that part, but it's all about addressing operating concerns just in the same way that meeting room displayed when those started coming out about 6-7 years ago, addressed a pain point as well.  Jason Ault: Absolutely. I think tying it into a sensor could definitely alleviate that concern. It also gives you analytics on how much it actually is being used.  Jason Ault: Exactly. Let's talk a little bit about AI. It's on everybody's minds these days. Have you looked at that as something that can help support your customers and support your business, or is it something you're just kind of watching? Jason Ault: We're playing with it and watching it. It has not made it to assisting our customers at this point, that something is coming down to the pipe with Signage Live and some of their offerings, where we can do some AI-generated things. But probably the first thing that's going to help our customers is an AI driven chat bot for our support team, to take the load off of them and then see if we can drill down some response and some resolve times. So somebody comes in and if they can get a question answered just by going through the chatbot prompts and delivering a solution or at least some information to them without having to wait for 5-10 minutes for one of your support people, that helps?  Jason Ault: Exactly. So that's probably the first thing that we're playing with and, of course, just like everyone, we're playing with it from a marketing and writing perspective. But just still watching it on how we can best utilize it by putting it into production for customer sake.  Yeah, my son is heavily into AI to the point where he is doing consulting for some people on what tools to use and everything else, and I've got him doing some work for me, and I've looked at things, and the image generation is interesting, but it's still very weird and surreal in certain respects, and on the writing side, it's great for people who can't write to save their lives, but for people like me, I've been in journalism for 40 years, it's like this stuff is so elemental and it can crank something out in 30 seconds, but it's not very good. Jason Ault: It's definitely still a jumping-off point, but it's gotta have someone of skillset to reread that and fix those mistakes or add in professional tone or the writing tone of the organization.  We've talked about headless and AI, obviously. Are there hardware sides of technology that you're watching and thinking it is going to be a big deal going forward? Jason Ault: We've pretty much set in our lane from a hardware perspective. Of course, we watch Direct view of the market that's evolving there. But, we're really just watching the products of our current partners, the big three screen manufacturers, and seeing the products that they are rolling out, coming off the line with, that we can put into the marketplace, but shiny balls and things like that, not really.  I try to keep my blinders on so no one gets confused or takes us too far down a rabbit hole. So we try to just keep main hardware partners, and main software partners and run the race.  To me, the thing that's going to be interesting is when micro LED gets to a level and maybe complementary technologies or very similar technologies that you start to see, non-traditional display services, whether that's architectural glass or even countertops, that you can start to see content arrive on and be crisp and visible and everything else. Jason Ault: Yeah, I definitely think that can go a long way with micro LED and the cost being affordable at scale for sure. We are getting more architectural requests, flying things on the ceilings, and whatnot. So we're watching in that regard just to see how we can help those architect partners that we talked about earlier on in our chats, fulfill some of their needs, that they design it. When you bump into new customers or potential customers and they ask you, alright what's a good reference account? What's something I could go check out? What do you tell them that you've done? Jason Ault: Yeah. We take a look at obviously, who they are, and if they're talking about quick service, we're pointing them in the line of Biggby Coffee or an up-and-coming chain, Crimson Cup Coffee. If we're talking about retail and malls, we'll take a look at malls for Washington Prime Group, and their 120 malls across the country. When it comes to Directview LED, we've got a couple of convention centers in Columbus and Texas, and then some adjoining hotels that have some direct view installations. If they're looking at cameras, we can tell them to jump into a number of hundred different areas across the country to take a look at. So we're not short on pointing people in the right direction, that's for sure.  Okay, if people want to know more about your company, where do they find you online?  Jason Ault: They can find us online at coffmanmedia.com or on LinkedIn with our Coffman Media company page. And where's the Coffman coming from? Jason Ault: So, we weren't really creative 13 years ago. So there was a founding family in Dublin, Ohio, the Coffman family, and we decided to make it a regional name play.  Fair enough. Is the Coffman family still involved?  Jason Ault: No, they were never involved. We just decided to name it after them; they probably don't even know it. Everyone asks, is there a Mr. Coffman who started it? No, there's not. Sorry, it's a boring story.  I know, but you can blame it on him. “Coffman did that, but he's gone.”  Jason Ault: Good point! Alright, Jason, thank you. Jason Ault: Alright, thanks, Dave. I appreciate it.

In this week's episode Tim sat down with Shopstory co founder and CEO, Andrzej Dąbrowski. From his background in building digital experiences in Ecom, Andrejz talks about how Shopstory empowers designers and marketers to build visual content without the use of code or developers. Thus meaning, developers can spend their time elsewhere. Hear Andrejz's thoughts visual building, CMSs and the Headless horse race between Shopify, commercetools, Centra, Commerce Layer et al. …………. Sign up to the Your Basket Is Empty newsletter here and learn more about Recharge here ⚡️ Enjoy ✌️

Leo nos habla sobre herramientas de AI para ayudarnos a escribir mejor código; Jail (@jailandrade) habla sobre los 20 años de WordPress y por qué sigue dominando la industria de los CMSs, y un framework llamado No Handoff para mejorar comunicación en proyectos; Hec (@soyhecsanchez) nos habla sobre los cambios por los que está pasando React y el ecosistema[00:01:01] Uso del copilot y herramientas. [00:04:39] Ayuda de herramientas de programación. [00:10:41] Experimentando con herramientas de IA. [00:14:50] ChatGPT y su utilidad. [00:18:39] Proceso iterativo y continuous discovery. [00:22:07] Software funcional sobre documentación extensa. [00:28:05] Cambios en tecnología de software. [00:31:05] Competencia en la web. [00:35:31] Cambio en React y Next. [00:40:10] La evolución de Next.js. [00:45:15] Estandarización y acompañamiento en desarrollo. [00:49:27] Aplicaciones robustas y herramientas nuevas. [00:52:41] El costo de JavaScript.

Live and direct from Springfield Mass at the Jazz and Roots Festival. A first for me on the show in terms of live coverage recorded on 7/21/23 in my home area. It is the tenth annual Springfield Jazz and Roots festival. As expressed on their website www.springfieldjazzfest.com - "In 2017, the Festival incorporated a New Orleans' style second line parade that germinated through Charles Neville's volunteer work with the Community Music School of Springfield. Charles founded and taught the Brass Band Camp with CMSS faculty. Inspired by their experience with Mr. Neville, the youth cohort continued to meet on a weekly basis and their unwavering enthusiasm blossomed into a year-round program". I was able to speak with several vendors here. Thank you to Owner of Plush Beauty Studios on 266 Bridge St. Springfield, MA - Gumersindo Gomez. Jasper of the Love Art Collective and Mix Media Artist Duan Rivera, all who took time to speak with me. Listen to their Perspectives on art, music, owning your own business and more. Please check them out on their social media platforms and a huge thank you to the city of Springfield for putting on another wonderful event this summer. Shout out to Deweys Jazz Lounge for always doing the damn thing. A huge shout out to the wonderful women I met from WTCC 90.7 reminding us all they are still there and doing it! 90.7 a staple here in our community. Hope you enjoy this episode and don't forget to follow the show on Instagram and Youtube.. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/los-reyes101/message

Frommm Wessssst Philadelphia, Ezra Cohen, raised in Mount Airy, Philadelphia, initially pursued a career in animation inspired by the Dire Straits' video "Money for Nothing." He attended the University of the Arts where he delved into various artistic mediums but found his true passion in metal sculpture, particularly artisanal blacksmithing. However, after graduation, a lack of resources and studio space led him and his friend to shift their focus towards graphic design. They established themselves in Philadelphia and New York for their work in Flash animation, featuring in the Macromedia 5 Flash Bible. However, the dot-com crash led to a significant downsizing of their operations, with Cohen transitioning to remote work and ultimately relocating to Prague in 2004.In Prague, after a considerable period of inactivity, Cohen took on a project for AOL following a mass layoff at the company, leading to a year of intensive work. The successful completion of this project resulted in a shift in his career trajectory. He moved to Olomouc, where he began to transition from Flash to open-source CMSs like WordPress and Drupal. This organically evolved into enterprise-level CMSs, custom software development, and eventually a return to front-end design. Cohen's success in his career, as he asserts, largely stemmed from effective networking, an aspect he continues to utilize extensively in his professional pursuits.On a personal note, around a decade ago, Cohen began focusing on his health in preparation for starting a family. He adopted a regular workout routine, reduced alcohol and coffee intake, and started following a flexitarian diet. Inspired by a documentary about longevity featuring Chris Hemsworth, he also explored various wellness practices such as cold therapy and microdosing. Furthermore, Cohen envisions opening a mega art studio equipped with everything from glassblowing to metalworking tools, designed to serve as a creative space for aspiring artists who lack resources, reflecting his own struggles as a young artist.Connect with Jay on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jayaigner/The First Customer Youtube Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/@thefirstcustomerpodcastThe First Customer podcast websitehttps://www.firstcustomerpodcast.comFollow The First Customer on LinkedInhttp://www.linkedin.com/company/the-first-customer-podcast/

The enshittification of Google Analytics:  Google analytics, with their forcing of GA4 on an audience that doesn't need, understand or want the complexity, has created an opportunity for the market to deliver simple, easy to implement and understandable analytics. Will this fall to a third party or will it surface organically within the CMSs and operational platforms that are currently available?Twitter, where art thou replacement?The enshittification  of Twitter has moved along at a rapid pace and into that void we have seen numerous efforts to provide alternatives. With Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky (and a host of wannabes) vying for their attention it isn't yet clear where anyone should focus and put their energies.  The FTC releases new review Guidelines & Rules for Reviews:This week the FTC went wild and crazy and published numerous and voluminous treatises providing Guidelines and proposed Rules for endorsements and reviews. Reviews have clearly been elevated in standing and the new guidance focuses on trying to maintain their honesty and integrity. But given that the real problems lie with Google and Amazon, and these effort largely excludes them, it is not clear what the impact will be. The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.NearMemo Ep119Subscribe to our 3x per week newsletter at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

What's up folks, today we have a super fun conversation with Pratik Desai, Founder and Chief Architect at 1to1. Pratik's a Rocket Scientist turned Martech personalization expert He's armed with a bachelor's from Rutgers in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering He got his start at Accenture in Technology Consulting and later J&J in consumer apps as a digital product manager He later took a deep dive into Martech when he became Lead product manager at PVH focused on Salesforce Marketing products This led him to spend 3 years at Salesforce where he worked his way up to Personalization Practice Lead (Head of Delivery Services for Personalization) Most recently, Pratik started his own agency called 1to1 to focus on personalization strategy and implementation  He also runs a weekly AI Discussion Group to help folks keep up with the fast changing landscape of Curation and Generative AI He's a well traveled, trivia loving full stack developer Pratik, pumped to chat with you today, thanks for your time!From Aerospace and Sci-fi to martech and personalization Pratik, you have a degree in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering as well as your pilot license, is this all a backup plan for AI takeover and you naturally shift to space exploration and interplanetary marketing?

In this episode, we speak with Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify. We discuss what it was like deploying code before Netlify, whether there is about to be a fragmentation in the JavaScript ecosystem as React gets more opinionated, where state and data fit into the Jamstack model, and how you might reach developers with a new project today. You'll hear about the evolution of Netlify's model, the Gatsby acquisition, and how Netlify has succeeded at staying on top of the fast-changing landscape.Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).Things mentioned:ReactShopifyJavaGatsbyNext.jsWordPressSolidJSPlanetScaleNeonRuby on RailsAstroMastodonNostrMacBook ABOUT MATT BIILMANNMatt Biilmann is the CEO and Co-Founder of Netlify, a cloud platform that helps people build, deploy, and operate websites, web applications, and web stores swiftly and with ease. He has a long history of building DevTools, content management systems, and web infrastructure. Matt has been an active participant in open source and contributed to many well-known projects, including Ruby on Rails, JRuby, and Mongoid. Since launching its private beta back in March 2015, Netlify is now used by 3.5 million developers and is one of the fastest-growing web development platforms in the world.Highlights:Matt Biilmann: I really believed that we would move away from that model and move to a model where we would decouple the actual web experience layer into its own layer that web teams can build and deploy independently, and hopefully much faster. But I also saw at the time that there wasn't any tooling or infrastructure or workflows around that. So early on, when we started Netlify, there wasn't even a name for this web building. We had to come up with the term “Jamstack” to describe this idea of building the web experience layer on its own and typically seeing the backend split into all these different APIs and services, like all the headless CMSs that's really become mainstream now.— [0:03:58 - 0:04:39] Matt Biilmann: Right now, what we're seeing happening around generative AI is probably going to change a lot of how we interface with computers over time, right? It's already almost at the edge where you can imagine stitching a few tools together, and you would be having this kind of conversation with a program, rather than with a human. I think as that starts to happen, that will start to massively redefine how we consume content and commerce and so on. It will probably change a lot of what it means to build a website.— [0:17:09 - 0:17:41] Let us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonOr by email: hello@console.devAbout ConsoleConsole is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don't have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Results from the WordPress 2022 Annual Survey have been released. WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy notes that this was a slimmed down version of the survey. It featured 29 questions - as opposed to nearly 100 in past editions. This led to a 26% increase in completion rate. However, there was also a 56% decrease in overall submissions.Among the highlights of this year's results:53% of respondents say they've used the Block Editor. Meanwhile, the Classic Editor saw a 25% drop in use.76% of respondents install WordPress themselves.68% agree or strongly agree that WordPress is as good as, or better than, other site builders and CMSs.Ease of use, flexibility, and plugin options were rated as the top reasons to use WordPress.The most frustrating aspects of WordPress were Gutenberg's unfinished status and the difficulty of learning full site editing.For more in-depth data, a slideshow is available for download.Links You Shouldn't MissWordPress turns 20 years old this month. And it has had a major impact on freelancers during its run. The WP Minute's Eric Karkovack took a look at how the software became the perfect tool for solo entrepreneurs and small agencies.Stacks, the first-ever community theme, is now available in the WordPress theme directory. The theme is geared towards creating slide decks that can be used in presentations. In the official announcement, core contributor Ben Dwyer writes that it's part of a “new initiative to provide high quality themes for free.”Last week, WordCamp US announced a new approach to programming. The flagship event is looking for speakers outside of the WordPress community. However, the traditional call for speakers is still part of the plan. It's now open to anyone interested in giving a presentation. WordCamp US will take place from August 24-26 in National Harbor, MD.Keeping with the WordCamp theme, the events may look different in the near future. WordPress Head of Programs & Contributor Experience Angela Jin laid out the vision for the Next Generation of WordCamps. The big change is in event programming. That includes a more clearly defined audience and a focus on specific topics. Community feedback is welcomed.From the Grab Bag Now it's time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.In acquisition news, WooCommerce multi-vendor plugin WC Vendors has been sold to Rymera Web Co. Rymera is known for building WooCommerce extensions, including Advanced Coupons and Wholesale Suite.MasterWP is providing $1,000 travel grants for WordCamp US speakers from underrepresented groups. The program is now accepting applications and sponsors.Security firm Patchstack reported a reflected XSS vulnerability in the free and pro versions of Advanced Custom Fields. The issue was patched in version 6.1.6, so make sure to update your installs.Speaking of Advanced Custom Fields, users will want to check out the ACF Annual Survey. The feedback received will help “guide the evolution” of the popular plugin.eCommerce platform Shopify has announced staffing cuts. In a letter to employees, founder and CEO Tobi Lütke said the platform's workforce will be “smaller by about 20%”. Additionally, Shopify Logistics has been sold to supply chain management firm Flexport.Developers Aurooba Ahmed and Brian Coords have launched WordPress Icons Library. It's a searchable index of all icons used within WordPress. Icons can be copied and pasted in various formats.You can hear Josepha Haden Chomphosy's thoughts on WordPress' 20th anniversary in the latest episode of the WordPress Briefing podcast.How do we navigate the future of WordPress? Bluehost will host a webinar on May 11 to discuss the latest trends and predictions. ★ Support this podcast ★

This week coming to you this week from The London Podcast Studios, host Matt is joined by Ann Charles (Radio TechCon) and Faraz Osman (Gold Wala Productions) to tackle the latest industry headlines.We find out why Global is investing in their Glasgow studios, how the BBC are tackling the coronation across all platforms and why movies are making a comeback - we discuss the new cinema-to-streaming symbiosis.Also up for discussion, Succession's big episode makes the Daily Mail's front page, Musk's BBC interview & NPR's decision to leave the platform over Twitter's media policies.AND in this week's deep dive, the Media Bill made simple. Samuel Oustayiannis, Associate at CMS Legal Services, shares his run-down of the 250+ page document and what parts matter most for the industry.And finally, we cover audio news in the media quiz!A Rethink Audio Production, produced by Matt Hill with support from Phoebe Adler-Ryan.Hear more from Sam about the The Media Bill on our Patreon.And follow CMSs' Media Bill Tracker for live updates as the legislation evolves - here. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Reach Media Network has been around the digital signage ecosystem since 2005, and like many of the companies in this sector, its focus and strategy has evolved a lot based on customer needs and marketplace conditions. The Minneapolis-area company got its start as a place-based media network, putting screens in venues on its own dollar, and making that investment back through ad sales. As pretty much anyone who's done a Digital Out Of Home network will confirm, ad sales is hard work, no matter the environment and audience. Reach was generating real money from ad sales, but with a business focused first on screens in community ice hockey rinks, the network's growth potential was finite. For the last several years Reach has been going to market instead as an end-to-end digital signage solutions provider, building up a pile of clients in sectors like corporate and health care ... and realizing reliable, recurring revenues from SaaS licenses. Reach is seeing a lot of success, despite operating pretty quietly, by servicing the hell out of its customer base, and putting a lot of investment into software integrations. I spoke with CEO Darren Wercinski and Kiersten Gibson, the company's EVP for Sales and Marketing. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Darren and Kiersten, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the summary that you would rattle off when someone asked you what your company's all about?  Darren Wercinski: Sure. Thank you for having us on the podcast today. We're excited to finally get to talk to you and share a little bit more about Reach. We actually started in 2005 and I feel really old as I tell stories today, thinking about sort of the company in general, but right now we have over 6,000 clients, and we manage around 30,000 screens. We really run the gamut, from large Fortune 500 clients, we do signage for Hormel, Caterpillar, and a lot of the big companies that you might be familiar with on a lot of college campuses so Northwestern, UCLA, and USC are all of our partners, and then likewise, I guess we've expanded a lot in the healthcare and Mass General and just a lot of industries and verticals.  If you've been in the industry as long as we have, you definitely get customers for every vertical, but the company has about 50 team members right now, we actually have 10 open positions. So we're really growing and we tell this to a lot of our clients that we feel like we're in a sweet spot of just big enough to provide a robust digital signage solution with a budget that we can afford to invest in things, but at the same time, kinda that small focus on customer service and support. Quite honestly, we've been in the industry so long, we've seen lots of things change. Dave, especially you'd know companies have come and gone. Business models have changed. Our own business model has changed and evolved. There's been consolidation in the industry, but as a whole, it's been a lot of fun. It's been a really great ride.  So where do you start and stop in terms of your services? You've got a software platform. Do you do managed services, aftercare, or that sort of thing as well?  Darren Wercinski: We would consider ourselves a full-service solution and what I mean by that is there are some signage companies or CMSs, and that's really what we are, that really focus on just downloading the software and you're good to go and go off and running.  Ours is a little bit different because we do provide the end-to-end solution. So our clients may say, Hey, we want screens, players, the signage, we'll sell them all that and then in addition, we'll actually use install cords to get them up and running and trained. We'll use our own creative team to build all their layouts and assets and really get them up and running from that perspective, along with technical support that's unlimited and account managers help them along the way. That's the way we look at the business of providing that end-to-end solution, which is a little bit different than other people as well. Is that an ask that you're seeing quite a bit in the marketplace?  I get a sense and have for a few years now, that large companies are interested in digital science. They see the benefits and everything else, but they don't wanna fully manage it and they would really prefer to have an outsourced solution that says, “This is what we want, you guys to do it”? Darren Wercinski: I wouldn't say we're an outsource solution. I think that our tool is so easy to use in terms of our content management platform. We try to make it so that clients can easily go in there and update and publish their content. Really, at the end of the day, that's all they really wanna do. So that's why we build the layouts for them, all the integrations, everything, and they can come in and easily manage the content.  Kiersten, what are your thoughts on that? You deal most with the clients.  Kiersten Gibson: Yeah, I would say, it boils down to the service and what the client's looking for. As Darren said, we'll be as hands-on or hands-off as needed in terms of that implementation, getting them up and running, building out everything for them.  In terms of the ongoing managed services, we're not necessarily creating the day-to-day content for them, but we are providing them with the support that they need. So for example, six months down the road, they might have a rebrand, or they might have a whole new group of users, or maybe their content is going stale and they want to get some automated applications into the signage, just so then maybe there's safety messaging or health tips or something like that that we can really assist with and provide that automated content. So I would say it just runs the gamut of what the client's use case is and who they have managing it. I think that's one of the things we've learned, especially with these larger projects. If they don't have that from the beginning, it might be something that they implement in six months and that's where we come in. That's where that support continues to be unlimited and ongoing, and we provide that whole service solution.  Darren Wercinski: I would say that reaches a very hands-on customer focused, client-focused company. We are here to help them. We're here to be flexible with their needs and I think that's really been part of our secret sauce in terms of adding a lot of clients across many industries. Kiersten Gibson: Just the one thing to add to that, with really the shift from our business model, we are SaaS-based and that service at the end is really the thing that we focus on. As Darren said, it's the software, but it's also the service and we provide, both end-to-end solutions that way. Yeah, I was gonna say that I've certainly run into companies through the years, software companies that are very good at sales, but it falls apart in aftercare. They close the deal and they're onto the next one, and they're not really paying much attention to their clients and as a result, you see a lot of attrition, a lot of churn, where end users have a contract with one company for three years, and as soon as that contract is lapsing, they're moving to somebody else because they're not seeing the kind of service they want. Darren Wercinski: Yeah, I mean we love the fact that these companies keep getting bought up by private equity firms and the first thing they cut out is their support. Even though I know you got bought out by a private equity firm, our secret. I'm on our support team, so…  Darren Wercinski: But I mean that for us is good news because it's just that model, which is when consolidation happens, usually support is one of the things to go, and that's where we can differentiate ourselves against bigger competitors and say, listen, they might do some things. They might be bigger, but we're certainly gonna be better on the support side, and we've seen a lot of new customers come over from companies that have and industries that have been left out there and we've swooped in and one I can think of, we just took over Texas A&M from a competitor that was for a number of years and now it's a network of over 400 licenses and they seem really happy with the service and excited to keep expanding.  I'm curious about that one in particular. We don't have to dig into it very much and cause any trouble, but I'm curious when they're making a switch, it's more about service and that sort of thing, as opposed to price, which used to be, and I guess still in the case in some situations where the reason why people switch is that they just wanna trim their budget. Darren Wercinski: Yeah, and I definitely think that and I'll just say the names, I don't care, it doesn't matter. When we go do RFPs against Four Winds or AppSpace or even Spectrio to some degree, it does come down to price and we try to add both the value component and our software, the service component and the price component, we're certainly gonna be under those three in particular, and we try to bring that value equation and lots of references from our other partners who may have used those guys or others in the past, who say, Reach is a great option and they're a little bit less expensive and they frankly do a better job.  I've been aware of Reach for many years now. It's been a little bit confusing because there's a whole bunch of companies out there that use the term ‘reach' if they're associated with media in some way and of course, there's RMG Networks, which confuses things for me.  Darren Wercinski: We actually, at one time, this is very long ago, I think his name was Gary McGuire, correct me if I'm wrong, and so that's how long we've been around. And so we were actually working with Lifetime Fitness and Lifetime Fitness was both working with our Reach and Reach Media Network and RMG and we had even a legal at Lifetime Fitnesses send us each individual contract for the wrong company, so that's how confusing it was and stuff. So we've just been around a long time in space, but really in our roots and I think that's maybe where some people don't know as much about Reach or just our story.  So we actually started out with Mark Klein, my business partner, and co-founder, this was years and years ago, so I think in 2005, we were thinking about a business model that could really attract in sort of the youth sports space and so I was working at Best Buy Corporate at the time in the strategy group, the one thing I realized was going to be a real challenge for Best Buy was the price of Plasma screens, if you can think that far back were gonna collapse. They knew this capacity was coming on in China. We knew the cost of screens was going down and so a $3,000 screen for 50-inch plasma was gonna go to $250 in two years or whatever the number was.  I was thinking about that space. Mark really liked to use Sports space and we decided to actually go with an ad-based model where we would give, in this case, ice arenas, which are big in Minnesota, by the way, in Canada, as you know. We would provide them with the software and the technology that could show their locker rooms, and that was really their pain point because they used to have those white easel boards out that would show you like they'd write on them the locker room assignments. So we actually started and integrated with some software companies that would show the locker room assignments and we'd go out and sell basically local ads to really fund it and so that's how the company grew and grew. Outside of Minnesota and Canada and a little bit on the East coast ice arenas just aren't really that big of a deal, and that's how we started expanding into other verticals, really more fitness-centric, so YMCAs, community centers et cetera, and we grew this ad-based market, and if you know anything about ads, and I think you do, especially in the digital signage, ads are certainly not bought, they're sold and it is a very grinding business. You're cold calling, you're relying on reps to really mow some commission base to go out and sell every year. There's not a huge high renewal rate on ads renewing every year. So that means you're going back into these same locations and trying to resell ads, and I'd say Reach has been a startup twice. So we actually built that business model just through ads and I'll say we think we had about a network of about 500 screens at the time. We built it to about a 5 million local ad business, which in that space is pretty amazing. So I'm always indebted to our ad team who helped build that out. But really at that time, I could see the writing on the wall that, in terms of trying to scale that business, which is next to impossible and actually there were some other companies doing that as well, and about that time, we either got to the point that our good locations or ad locations, they didn't want ads, they just wanted to use our software, and they said, “Hey, we really love your software. We don't want the ads on the screen. Can we just pay you a fee?” And I started thinking, yeah, that sounds great because it's that recurring fee, and at other times, we had ad locations that were terrible and in a bad part of town, or we couldn't sell ads, so we went to them and said, listen, we're gonna close this thing down unless you want to pay a fee and they said, sure, we'd love to, and so we slowly started transitioning our business model and we started getting into more colleges and just using our entire application to solve many of the use cases that we still have today.  Do you do any digital out-of-home stuff now?   Darren Wercinski: We do a little bit just because I'm so damn loyal to all those reps who've helped build the company. So we do still have a little bit of that business, but primarily it's almost everything is geared toward software as a service. At one time, I'll say eight years ago for the platform we had about 20 reps, one IT guy, maybe one other support guy, and the rest were just grinding through ads, and so now we have almost 20 developers and IT people, we have a variety of different teams. Kiersten, you could probably tell me more about how the company's changed over those years.  Kiersten Gibson: Starting out with what Beer Pong lunches on Wednesdays with a group of 10 of us? Darren Wercinski: Those were the good days. Those were the fun days, Dave, where you could just relax at lunch and play some Beer Pong and sometimes the problem was a Beer Pong extended from lunch into the afternoon, into the evening. Kiersten Gibson: There's a lot more structure.  Darren Wercinski: No, there are maybe some good stories. Kiersten Gibson: Yeah, I was gonna say, definitely 10 years ago, that's when I started with the company, I sat next to our one developer. There was one support guy who also installed too. So we still installed the screens for these ad-based facilities, but, the one thing I would say, as Darren said, is we have 20 developers now from the one when I started, but then also just our customer success teams. We always knew that support obviously was a big component. We've always had at least one support person when the company started. But now we have just different customer success teams that we continue to build on. As Darren said, our install coordinators are more or fewer project managers for that implementation. We have an account management team, we have a support team, we have a design team. We're building our marketing. So one of the things that are really exciting, especially what I've been involved in, is not only expanding our clients but building our partnerships, not only with our hardware providers but some of our integrator partners. Like Darren was mentioning with the locker room schedules and everything, just really expanding on that because at the end of the day, building their confidence with us is only gonna help build our client portfolio as well. I found it interesting when you were talking about the locker room schedules, Darren.  Going back to the mid-2000s doing data integration like that, and that's fundamentally what it was, was pretty rare. You would see it in airports on departure screens and so on. But that was pretty much it. So you were doing what I call boring signage, but boring being a good term, going way, way back. Is that still a substantial amount of what you do? Darren Wercinski: The integrations are the key to our entire business, and that's how we also differentiate ourselves in terms of our integration. So it's a skillset and a capability that we built early on, and you're right, you have to think of a way that makes the signage actually useful to your end users and creates value to not only the people seeing your screens, but into the locations, and so they have something that people actually wanna see, and so in our case, our first hook was really around pulling and scheduling information, and we've expanded that into so many different areas. So our capabilities around the integrations are really key. And I know Dave, I've seen in some of your other podcasts, or you even mentioned a little bit about the way you think that some CMSs are too generic in nature and that they should be industry-focused, and I agree with you in one respect, but I think on the other, you have to have a capability that's really meaningful to clients over time, that actually does give you some stickiness and the other thing I was thinking about and why you don't know as much about Reach is I think we took a little bit different path in terms of our own marketing and how we grew a lot of our clients, whereas some other CMSs may have just focused on going to the sort of the industry trade shows, which we went to as well, we would go heavy into a vertical trade show.  So we would find a vertical we like, maybe it's churches or car washes, and we'd start hitting all these industry-specific shows. So we would be the only digital signage company that would be setting up a booth at these kinds of random verticals and it started to really grow because we'd be the only ones there, and you'd start to take on 10, 20, 40, 50 customers. So you develop some capabilities within these industries. So you'd become the car wash guy or you become the church guy, or you become this variety of verticals, and I think that really helped in our growth. Now that we've expanded with so many clients, we don't do quite as much of that anymore, but it's really the way in which we navigated our client growth and our go-to-market strategy.  Yeah, and I think that's really smart. I've written about that a few times, about companies that don't put all of their marketing eggs in the Infocom or the DSE basket. They show up at these weird little shows like airport technology or airport security conference. Yeah, and like you say, you're the one pretty girl at the dance.  Darren Wercinski: Yeah, it's made a huge difference in terms of that, and I think that kinda gets back to our support too. When you start to build these relationships and people refer you and you grow your market space there.  You mentioned, you're doing more work in hospitals and corporate, is that because you've focused on it, or is it just an area that seems to be growing? Darren Wercinski: Kiersten is our EVP of Sales and Marketing, and she is the one that's really talking to the customers and has the most insight. I'm just the one that watches the sales come in, and smiles at the end of the month, hopefully.  And yells at people if they don't come in! Darren Wercinski: Yeah, that's right. I do that. Thank you, Dave. I like that.  Kiersten Gibson: I would say in terms of hospitals and our corporate clients, it wasn't like we were going after that industry by any means. I always think of it as a use case. We could provide the same exact use case for a corporate company that we provide for a hospital, that we provide for education, and my examples always go back to say break rooms. So employee communications, it really doesn't matter which vertical you're in, that use case is pertinent to any type of industry.  I think with Covid, that's where we saw the biggest uptick in corporate and healthcare for us, Mass General was one of the biggest ones that came to us pre-Covid and really working with their Head of IT to build the network within Partners Healthcare, which that's what Mass Journal is a part of. So that's just one example. But in terms of our corporate and employee communications, where we really started seeing it taking off again, going back to those integrations, we really focused on the integrations that were most common amongst our entire client portfolio. So one example is Power BI. We were one of the first CMSs to build a Power BI app that was easily authenticated by pulling their reports and dashboards, we built a OneDrive integration. We built Zoom, WebEx, and Teams integration. So all these are small integrations that they don't have to pay extra for, they can easily do it themselves. That is something, I think that's where we saw our corporate footprint really start to grow. Darren Wercinski: The other thing that's funny about that, because I was on some of those calls, and I was thinking about the Power BI one in particular with the client and they're still our client, they've been with us for five or six years and they've grown quite a bit. We were on the call, and they said, can you do this? And I'm eyeing my Head of IT. His name is Nate Davis. He's outstanding, our chief technology officer, and Nate's always great cuz he says there is definitely a way we can build this, how much it's gonna cost and how much time it's gonna take might be a different thing. But we ended up building this and I committed to the customer at the time, we're gonna get this Power BI app built and we built it in, I'll say four weeks or whatever. But it's a great application and that's kind of the way in which we go to market in terms of if our clients are asking for something and we think we can build it for them and then, and obviously leverage it to other clients as well, that is certainly something we will do to help win some deals and show that flexibility and our willingness to partner with our clients over time. Is that why you have 20 developers? Because it seems like a lot of people for a relatively small company to be focused on development, but there's a lot of work to do those integrations, right?  Darren Wercinski: There is, but that is twofold. One, we have a goal of doubling our revenue in the next two, basically two years. So we feel like we're in a really good spot. We're really aggressive now in hiring people and coming out of Covid and realizing the success that we've had and we'll continue to have. We really wanna hit the accelerator. So I've been spending a ton of money on the team. We're doing a giant CMS rewrite that we're spending almost $2 million on and we're all in to try and take the company to the next level, and I don't even mind telling people this, because it's just part of our vision, a year ago we were at $5 million in recurring revenue and. We had a great year last year and we expect to be at $10 million by the end of 2024. So those are some big aspirational jumps, but that's what we're going for..  And how is this being funded? Is it just out of your own revenues, or are you docked?  Darren Wercinski: I guess I had some original investors. Thank you, mom, my uncle, and my cousins, but it's all been I just raised a little bit of seed money when I first started, this is 2005. We haven't raised money in, I don't know, 10 years, and I bought out a lot of the investors along the way. They literally put in $10,000-$20,000 bucks. It's a lot of money, but relatively speaking, it was small, but I've always focused on making money. So that's the one thing. I never wanted to be beholden to investors or banks or anybody else. I've never taken VC money because I had a vision for the company. I wanted to control it, and I was perfectly fine by the way, running on a path that was different from others, I was fine with incremental or continuous growth and making a profit at the same time and maybe that's why we didn't grow as fast as we could have because I had a budget and I stuck to it. But at the same time, I think it puts you in a much better position.  When you're scrappy all the time, it forces you to do different things, and I'm not saying Kiersten and the team would call me cheap, would you ? Don't answer that!  But I was very prudent, and I really wanted to invest in the things that I thought added the most were the most meaningful for our clients so support and, being flexible with them and trying to, provide free services, like creative and all these things that, that really add value over time. To answer your question, I think our paths have been a little bit different but certainly one, I won't go back on.  Are you getting the phone calls and the emails and, how are you doing from private equity and VC people?  Darren Wercinski: I do, but I don't respond, and it's been nonstop, and actually, so there are different stages in the SaaS company: if you can get to $1 million, you can grind out and do that. If you can get to the $2 to $3 million, that's a win, and when you get to $5 million, it's an interesting thing because private equity and some VCs, start to come hard because they like the model and it's working. They have a lot of cash available too, that's in the industry. So they're trying to make investments and do things. But for me, it was never really about the money or trying to sell. Obviously, we have had the company for almost 20 years, I love the employees. I love what we're doing. I think for me, resetting our goals of trying to double our revenue was really exciting because we also had to redo, we had to add staff. We're adding some new leadership right now in terms of a Customer Success Director to really manage the team and hopefully take our customer success to the next level, and so to me, the challenge is trying to grow that revenue and really redo things in a company and build in new processes that are gonna make us scalable to that $10 million bogey. Put it this way, I'm not gonna be sitting on a beach and Nova Scotia with you, Dave, counting all the cash that you made.  That's right. You wouldn't want to today anyways. It's snowing, although not as bad as it does in Minnesota. I was curious, about one thing you said where you are doing a complete software rewrite, and is that kind of a nod to web services and everything that's emerging with technology right now where you can't just continually build out something, traces back in some respects to 2005. I know a company in the UK that built their platform in I think 2015 and by 2019 or so, they said, you know what, we're tearing it up and we're gonna rebuild just because they could see all the new capabilities out there.  Darren Wercinski: There are two answers to your question. One is: we were getting customer feedback which may have been great by the way. Our NPS score is super and we love that stuff they give great feedback every time that we can really use, and some of it was: It's a little hard to use now. It's a little clunky. It's a little this thing. We love your stuff, and we really needed to just take a look at our c m s and make it easier to use the challenge. So going back when you try and please every customer, you end up building a lot of one-off stuff along the way, and all of a sudden you look at your application, and yeah it's robust, but it's not exactly intuitive because you have to do X, Y, and Z. And we built a lot of this stuff quickly to try and get those deals closed and build it out. So one first part was just, you know what? We need to refresh and reset and get more customer feedback and more UI and UX capabilities into our platform. So that was the trigger number one. The second was: the industry's changing too, by the way. It's not just signage on a screen anymore. You have to be able to reach people outside of your traditional office setting or facilities, and so we've spent more time trying to make our application flexible so people from home can see our digital signage on their computers through teams or through websites digital signage, or just a more flexible approach to meet people because they're not always coming into the office anymore. And the communications team still wants to reach people. We just wanna be a more flexible platform to do that.  Kiersten, do you have any additional thoughts on that? I know you talked to the clients quite a bit.  Kiersten Gibson: I was gonna say, going back to when I started too, one thing you might not know about me, Dave, but Darren hired me as our project manager for our mobile application that he thought was really gonna take off Darren Wercinski: You test and you'll learn, okay, Dave, you test and you learn and you evolve. I have no problem making mistakes, a lot of mistakes, and learning from them.  Kiersten Gibson: So learning how to code without having a degree in coding was very interesting. But we did it. But no, I would say, one thing I've learned over the years is, we tried to add on all these additional solutions. What we learned was we can't be everything to everyone and really focus on what we're good at, which again goes back to that digital signage. But we do have these additional solutions we still support. The mobile app still brings us a decent amount of revenue. So our mobile application that employees can download to view more information, it can be, again, going back to those fitness centers, maybe they're viewing schedules, things like that. But what we've really tried to push people towards is, like Darren said, the website digital signage, where it's say, embedded in their intranet.  So they can push the same messaging from their digital signage into the website. So remote employees can view the same messaging and it's right there too. So you're not expected to say it's a screensaver. It's not something that a particular employee can disable. It's something that they're forced to see because they have to go on their intranet every day. So I'd say that's what we've seen. It's just kind of an add-on to their digital signage network if you will.  Are you finding that the average customer is more equipped with knowing what they want and how they're going to use it than in the past when, I'm sure, 10 years ago the conversations you had were just explaining what the hell digital signage was and I assume now that they know exactly what it is and they know how they wanna use it?  Darren Wercinski: Yeah, if you think about it, I'll say even five years ago, we used to sell a hell of a lot more hardware in this all-in-one solution where we would sell them the screen, the media player, the installation, the mounts, we'd sell all because that's all they knew, and so over the last couple years, our hardware has gone way down, which is awesome because that's one industry we don't want to be in, and we're repurposing a lot of stuff. So we repurpose some competitors' players at times, we start to just sell more software and it's already set up as well where we're just replacing stuff that they have. I am also curious about AI and how that plays a role in future development, or does it?  Darren Wercinski: For us? Not really. I can't say that's been a question, I know there are other companies out there that actually do that. They may be more retail-centric or whatever. I wouldn't say retail's a huge industry for us because there are certain things that other companies do better than us. We have not spent any time really thinking about AI. We're really trying to focus on trying to expand our “reach” outside of the traditional office setting through those applications that Kiersten had just mentioned.  Yeah, I know all the AI stuff for digital science to date has been focused on computer vision, but I could imagine all kinds of capabilities around content production, smart scheduling, smart triggering, and all that sort of stuff down the road. But it's still just evolving right now.  Darren Wercinski: Yeah, and it's just a capability. As Kiersten mentioned, we can't be everything to everybody, and we're really trying sort of stick to that.  Reach has been notoriously famous for creating applications that were about 80% done, we would get them to work, but we never really got that full implementation, and communication out to the client. So that's actually the one thing that I changed last year in terms of the beginning of 2022, maybe it's all my fault, but it was a direction we set where we really were trying to always, and now it's like no, let's just hit the pause button, let's do things that are meaningful, let's say things that are purposeful that our clients are asking for, and that we can communicate back out. And so that was one of the big shifts that we made at the beginning of last year, and to get user feedback, we would build stuff sometimes with basically never talking to our clients or assuming what they wanted, and then it would sometimes be right but sometimes be wrong, and so we really hit the pause button and changed our strategy around real development, and that's also why I think we added seven developers last year and just changed some processes. As I said, these are big investments in space.  All right. This has been great. If people want to know more about your company, where do they find you online? Kiersten Gibson: Yeah, you can find us on our website. There is a contact us form that they can fill out to learn more. So our website is reachmedianetwork.com  As opposed to the four or five other Reach Medias that you'll find if you Google it?  Kiersten Gibson: Reach Media Network Digital signage. Darren Wercinski: You know what's funny? One last thing is we were actually BroadSign's second or third customer, just to give you a sense of how long we've actually been in the space. RIP Brian Deseo because I was sorry to hear that. But I remember working with Brian and they were actually out in Idaho at the time, that's how long ago it was. But I just thought about it, thinking about the company and our journey over the years to see Broadsign where they're at and where we're at. But we actually were the second or third customer way back in 2000.  Back in the day, yeah. All right. Thanks again for taking the time with me. Darren Wercinski: Appreciate it, Dave. We look forward to seeing you at your next party.  Kiersten Gibson: Thanks, Dave. 

In this podcast episode, Fran and Jeff talk with Rob Humar, the head of web development at Dexertos, the world's largest esports publishing platform. As a media company, Dexertos does around 60 million monthly page views. Rob walks us through some of the details of the Dexertos tech stack, which includes Next.js and headless WordPress using WPGraphQL. Rob discusses how the primary driver of their switch to headless was new feature velocity and futureproofing their frontend stack. By sticking with WordPress as the CMS for their 80K posts, they were able to gain some of the benefits of a full rewrite without migrating CMSs. As we dig into the details, we talk about how Dexertos uses Next.js ISR WPGraphQL Smart Cache to handle some of the demands of breaking real-time news.As an international publisher, Dexertos also has sites in French and Spanish, and Rob describes how they manage all of this using WordPress multisite for the CMS and using one Next.js codebase across all three different sites. Rob walks us through what the experience for the content editor looks like on the Dexertos site, which limits some of the choices in the block editor and uses ACF to structure data for custom post types.  As of December 2022, Dexertos won esports coverage platform of the year, which is a testament to the work Rob and his team are doing on their platform.

In this episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott look at the the Web Almanac's report on the role of JavaScript on the web in 2022. Auth0 - Sponsor Auth0 is the easiest way for developers to add authentication and secure their applications. They provides features like user management, multi-factor authentication, and you can even enable users to login with device biometrics with something like their fingerprint. Not to mention, Auth0 has SDKs for your favorite frameworks like React, Next.js, and Node/Express. Make sure to sign up for a free account and give Auth0 a try with the link below. https://a0.to/syntax Sentry - Sponsor If you want to know what's happening with your code, track errors and monitor performance with Sentry. Sentry's Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. It works with any language and integrates with dozens of other services. Syntax listeners new to Sentry can get two months for free by visiting Sentry.io and using the coupon code TASTYTREAT during sign up. Freshbooks - Sponsor Get a 30 day free trial of Freshbooks at freshbooks.com/syntax Show Notes 00:11 Welcome 01:17 College football update 04:07 Web almanac for 2022 JavaScript in the 2022 Web Almanac 06:25 Unused JavaScript 07:47 JavaScript requests per page 09:38 Bundlers 14:01 Pages using Babel 16:01 How JavaScript is requested 19:22 Sponsor: Sentry 20:56 Loading render blocking tags 22:48 Dynamic import, web workers, source maps 24:33 Libraries and frameworks Owl Carousel Lazy Sizes 29:30 Websites using web components 31:35 Websites with JavaScript security issues 32:43 Sponsor: Auth0 33:58 Jamstack 37:09 JavaScript used by Jamstack sites 38:03 Jamstack hosting 39:46 Popular Static site generators 44:49 Progressive web apps and service workers 50:29 jQuery inside WordPress themes WeCrashed 51:13 Project Fugu Project Fugu 52:51 Web push notifications 55:49 CMSs 00:45 Sponsor: Freshbooks 01:40 SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Scott: White Lotus Wes: Ubiquiti Shameless Plugs Scott: LevelUp Tutorials Wes: Wes Bos Tutorials Tweet us your tasty treats Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

In episode 133 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O'Keefe and guest Carrie Hane of Sanity talk about headless CMSs. If your organization isn't already going down this route,... Read more » The post What is a headless CMS? (podcast) appeared first on Scriptorium.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Mediavue Systems has the somewhat unique experience of being a PC manufacturer that started in digital signage, versus any number of companies that had personal or industrial computers with the dimensions, specs and pricing that met the industry's needs and desires at the time. One hell of a lot has changed in the intervening 15 years, and the Boston-based company has shifted with them. Erik DeGiorgi co-founded the business with his dad Dave. He's now its President and focused on what he says is a major evolution of the company and brand. His goal is changing industry perceptions about what Mediavue does, to a point that he now talks about the company more as a software shop than a hardware manufacturer. That's because Mediavue has been steadily developing software tools - most notably for configuration, deployment, remote device management and security. The IT people they work with think much more about uptime and efficient management than they do about the size of the box or, in particular, the price. I had a great chat with Erik about the roots of his company and where PC hardware and software sit in an industry landscape that now also has options for low-cost smart displays and single-purpose media players. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Eric, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on MediaVue systems?  Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, sure, Dave, first and foremost, thanks for having me on, and also thanks for the invite next month. Looking forward to seeing you and everybody else at the mixer. Nice to get back to reality there, huh? No kidding.  Erik DeGiorgi: But yeah, sure. I'll give you a snapshot. We've been around for about 16 years at this point. So MediaVue was founded in 2007. The initial product we brought to market was now what's called a media player. We started designing and building bespoke hardware for the industry back before there was really a name for it, and so we brought to market our first hardware device, I believe it was probably 2008 when we went to market, and the company's evolved quite a bit over the past 15 years. We initially went to market through our channel relationships with CMS partners. So back in the day, we were a heavy SCALA house long before the StrataCash acquisition and everything. But we partnered with CMSs. We started to develop operating systems, include that on our devices and embed CMS and try to make it as turnkey as possible. The evolution of the companies really centred around the kind of product innovations and responses to needs in the market. So again, at the very beginning it was, let's build a device that can go and be turned on 24/7, play videos and not break as they all were. Then it was, okay, we fixed that, then how do we create it more turnkey because of all the problems we were encountering? The integration, putting the software in the hardware. Then once we resolved that it became an issue of scalability. So, if you remember back, 10-15 years ago, these large-scale networks would be deployed, but there'd be no network management. The people would transition, and there'd be no way to know what was in the field. There'd be no way to cope with the problems when they would arise. It was just really an operational nightmare for the system integrators and certainly the end customers that were trying to scale these networks. So we responded to that and built out a robust network management platform. So that really was the kind of pivot point where we moved from being really a hardware company to a software company. So today, fast forward, what we deliver is really a turnkey operating platform. So it's a combination of hardware, it's a combination of our software management tools, support that goes along with that. It's the integration of CMS software. It's audience analytics, whatever you need to design and deploy and manage signage networks in an array of markets, we now have a fairly robust platform that supports that at scale.  That's interesting that you describe yourself as a software company. I would think most people who know MediaVue would think, they're a hardware company. They make small form-factor PCs for signage. Erik DeGiorgi: And I may be getting ahead of myself because, as I do, but we are actually poised to go extensive, top to the bottom rebrand of the company right now and teaser come January, the look and feel of MediaVue is gonna be quite different.  So did you start the company with digital signage in mind or were you doing industrial computing and found your way into it? Erik DeGiorgi: So David, our CEO was previously, his previous company was actually in display repair. So this was back in the 90s and the early 2000s. When people used to fix things, he was repairing CRTs and was doing that for all the major brands. He had service contracts with Dell and ViewSonic and Mitsubishi. If you bought a PC at Circuit City, you know the service contract would go to him. So he was doing large scale monitor repair, and by virtue of that, he got pulled into the digital signage industry because of early projects, this is 20 years ago, he had the service contract for the display and this was back in the day of, hanging a Dell Optiplex on the back of a screen in a large harness, and those things were failing left and right, and by virtue of having the contract for the display, they asked him if they could fix those, and so he got into that business and then looked at that and said, is there a way to build a better mousetrap here? And that was the origin story. MediaVue was started, and we went to work on what became our first media player, but it was very much in response, having the exposure to the earliest deployments, seeing the catastrophic failure rates, and then coming up with a solution. David DeGiorgi is your dad, right?  Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, you will see a common last name there. He and I sat down and started MediaVue in about 2007.  Is he still involved?  Erik DeGiorgi: He is still involved. I've read some of your recent postings and things, there comes a time in life when you maybe step back from some things and focus on some other things and, Dave, will never slow down, don't let me mischaracterize him. Yeah. He's a bit of a live wire from what I remember of meeting him.  Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, he's 110% at all times. But yeah, we certainly work in tandem and have since the outset.  And you're in the Boston area, right?  Erik DeGiorgi: Yep. Our HQ is just south of Boston, and we've got an international presence. We've got sales teams out in MEA and spread across certainly here domestically. But one of the things that I think is unique, going back to our roots, in hardware, we still have our assembly line in Boston, so since day one and continuing today, I think the majority of what we do is really in the kind of management tool set and all of the software stack and the integration and everything that we do at that level, we still design and assemble hardware, and we do that in the back half of our headquarters and we've got our assembly floor right there along with the front of house. And how does that resonate with resellers and end users? Is that important to them that it's domestically made?  Erik DeGiorgi: I don't know if it's there's a Made in USA badge on it, and that's important to me. I think where the value comes from having control over that process. So our assembly line is very adaptable. So we can very quickly respond to the needs of customers. So whether that's a hardware configuration, whether that's a setup and an integration with different software, we can do all of that and make very quick adjustments to our assembly line to accommodate the customer and I think that's where the value is. Yeah, I'm sure there are people who do wanna buy products made in the USA but I, I tend to think there's probably a lot more who are buying for other reasons and like the idea that there's the support that is in 12 hours away and in Mandarin.  Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, absolutely, and the full experience that you get with MediaVue is based domestically, So everything, the account rep you get obviously is regional, you get attached with a Sales, Engineering, and CSE at the beginning, that's a person that's domestically based. That individual works with you through pre-sale. When it converts to a sale, that person maintains the attachment to that account. You have continuity there throughout the lifetime of the deployment, and that's how we differentiate. Our origins are certainly in hardware, we're doing a lot more now. But we're never gonna be able to compete on cost with some of our OEM competitors out in Asia. There's just absolutely no way. So we have to create a lot of value add. We have to create a lot of it's an experience working with us. It's the whole lifetime of the engagement and the deployment, it's very hands-on, and that's how we've been able to differentiate.  You describe the old days of Dell Optiplex hanging off the back of monitors and back in 2007, at that time, it was a big deal to come up with a small form factor PC. That doesn't really matter anymore, does it? Cuz everybody is like that.  Erik DeGiorgi: The playing field has levelled, certainly on the hardware side it's, but it's in form factor, it's in computing power. The value proposition back then was, how many bits and bytes can I put in the smallest form factor and, run my 720p video and, do that successfully, and the playing field is flattened there. It's not as competitive as it was. The computing's kind of caught up.  I always get a kick out of how many pixels can you actually put on a display before you have to be three inches away from it before you can tell, so it's like hardware is caught up, I think, to the industry's need if that makes sense. So now it really becomes about the value of Integration. How do you successfully roll out a deployment? How do you have that go as seamless as possible, both in the installation and in the ongoing management and maintenance of that network? Because we all know the greatest cost to doing that is getting people in the field, turning wrenches and screwdrivers. So the more you can minimize that ease, the burden for the integration partner. Certainly, that brings value to them as they're reselling things in managed services contracts. It brings value to the end customer because the cost of operating the network in total is far less. So really honing in on the stability, reliability, the scalability of these networks is, I think, more of our present challenge rather than, packing pixels on screens and having more gigabytes of processing power.  I'm gonna guess that resellers and integrators understand that a lot more than end users. Erik DeGiorgi: There's certainly a learning curve. The ones that have been through it and felt the pain know it very well. You have to go through it to see that. We still get opportunities to come across and people will haggle on price and this box is a hundred dollars less than that box or something and we try to educate, we try to help people see the light, if you will, and look at the total cost of ownership of these networks a little bit differently maybe than they are, and it's one of those lessons that you have to learn.  And I noticed on your product list that your small form factor, I forget the name of it, but it was a small box and it just had a Celeron running in it, and it used to be the case that people would pay a lot of attention to the generation of the processor and everything else and they might think that a Celeron not powerful enough, but they are now, right? Erik DeGiorgi: Yes, certainly years ago, it was very much spec driven, and it was very important to, gigabytes of this and megabytes of that. Like I was saying before, the technology's kind of caught up to the needs of the industry and there's only so much you're doing. Compute power really is now doing onsite analytics and doing things like real-time decisions and stuff like that, that's pushing thresholds. It's just not as important a factor because there's just enough there.  When you started it was PCs and PCs, that's what people used for digital signage. There was the odd sort of dedicated player type, like the old digital view boxes, and there were a few others out there. But then smart displays came along, BrightSign bubbled up, and now you have two categories that you're competing with. How do you sell against those?  Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, so that's a great question. So we're rooted still in that PC tradition, and we do so because we're looking at the life cycles of these deployments and we believe that kind of platform has the required adaptability and scalability where some of these other architectures don't, simply I look at it as, if you're rooted in kind of this PC topology and architecture, it's built to do a lot of things versus doing one thing very specifically if that makes sense. So it has the ability to adapt not just to the initial customer needs, but throughout the lifetime of the deployment, and that's getting into some of the things we're gonna be rolling out first, at the beginning of next year, really rely on that adaptability, that topology. There are also some big security issues, and it's something that's not discussed in the industry that is very much overlooked when you get into ARM-based products, and I will try not to get too technical here, like smart displays when I say system on a chip and stuff like that, that's a hardware stack, that's a chipset that is licensed and manufactured by any no name, chip house that you've never heard of versus say an Intel, AMD and the major difference from a security perspective is that you need to maintain Operating system, you need to maintain your operating system and have that be updated because a lot of your security, a lot of your threat mitigation comes from having a stable and current operating system. What happens is when you use these unknown chip manufacturers to develop the SOCs and things like that, they don't maintain driver support for the current operating system updates. So what happens is you are unable to continually update your operating environment because you don't have strong driver support for those chipsets. So in our opinion, that creates significant security vulnerabilities. So it's yet another reason why we maintain the kind of traditional Intel and AMD chipset topology.  Is it your opinion and perspective, or are you hearing real-world stories talking about that?  Erik DeGiorgi: I don't hear many people talking about it. I think it's one of those things like many things in the security world that is just unknown, and it's not something that comes up. So it's a message we're certainly trying to get across.  So the devil's advocate argument would be if you're not hearing about it, maybe it's not really a thing? Erik DeGiorgi: Maybe. I can't argue with that but it's not likely. We're a very technical company, so when we all sit around at the lunch table, these are the kinds of conversations we have about vulnerabilities. So we're on the pulse of it may be a little more than others and paying attention to it a little more than others, but yeah I do think it's there, and so it's a combination of that. It's a combination of a kind of being there are inherent limitations, capability, and limitations when it comes to those types of chipsets as well, you're not able to just load any software on it. You're not able to go and connect peripheral devices to it. It doesn't have that degree of adaptability. So it's for all those reasons, we've stayed with the kind of technology stack, the topology that we have.  My perception, and I'm definitely not a hardware expert or a software expert, is that these days, if you have a simple application like digital menu boards or FIDS displays, those sorts of things you probably don't need a PC for that. But if you're getting into anything, complicated and challenging, and as you say, it needs to evolve and have some malleability to it, you're probably gonna lean towards a PC. Is that a fair perception?  Erik DeGiorgi: I think it's a fair perception. I think it's consistent too with where we position in the market. There are so many kinds of more simple use cases, I got a menu board and that's up and running. I'm gonna say that with a caveat but I'll get back to that in a second. The majority of digital signage is putting a picture on a screen, right? And that's about as simple as it gets, and we obviously can do that. I don't think our value is in that kind of In that type of use case.  And you're probably not gonna win on price?  Erik DeGiorgi: We're certainly not gonna win on price, and we've got no problem with it, it's just not our market. We're really focused on how we can be a technology partner for a large-scale enterprise that wants to deploy signage and communications infrastructure as an asset for their organization, and we partner closely with them. We work with, like I said, all of our software partners on the CMS side, and all our integration partners to put together a technology platform and an implementation program in order to deploy and manage that at scale. That's our sweet spot. Going back to the QSR example, menu boards, I guess you could say are simple, right? You're putting it up there. It doesn't really change much, It's just but then what happens when a menu board goes down? Because that's your business. If you don't have a menu, how are you gonna sell it? It's where we bring value to say that the application is doing things where you might have content switching. You might have redundancy in those menu boards. So do things with a bit more sophistication to make sure you're managing uptime and maintaining uptime. You can look at something and see it as simple, but at the same time to do it well at scale, there's always increasing layers of complexity. Yeah that's an interesting point because I think of digital menu boards as being really simplistic applications, but they can go down. So you need that failover and everything else.  Erik DeGiorgi: There's that, and then it's also a really dirty environment. We've done QSRs and gotten devices back that you have to scrape the grease out. Again, there's always more complexity than you see at first glance.  Is it fair to think that you probably tend to get more involved in projects than other companies that are just basically selling boxes?  Erik DeGiorgi: Certainly, yeah. That's our value proposition, that's our model. Our sale is as much our management tool, our ongoing support and service, as much as the device, if you will. We're very hands-on. We're able, again, to be very flexible and adaptable to the customer's needs and that's not just to get the project going. That's the long-term maintenance and management and of course in conjunction with our integrator partners.  You have something called an Active Network Manager. What is that and why is it needed?  Erik DeGiorgi: Sure. So that is the name of the management stack of our software that I've been referencing. And so that was designed and built. We started working on that maybe not quite 10 years ago but pretty close, and that was to solve the problem with scalability. As I had mentioned previously, the devices work, and the integration with the CMSs works, but it was very difficult to deploy and manage at scale. So what that tool enables now, so if you partner with a MediaVue and purchase our product, what you're gonna get is you're gonna get an endpoint. You're gonna get a media player, a device that's gonna have an operating system installed on it that we design specifically for the content management software or other software that's being used and that is maintained. So part of our offering is not just the deployment of that, but we actually have a quarterly update scheme for our entire operating environment. So we will aggregate all the different updates and security patches and everything for the entire software stack, and then we test and validate and then bundle everything. So you don't get that kind of experience where your iPhone updates and all of a sudden your app doesn't work, so we eliminate that as a possibility, and then obviously stay on top of security. So you get that, and then the kind of software that brings all that together is our Active Network Manager, and that enables an installer to plug in the device, push the power button, and then have the network owner, the person that is, is managing the network to see that come up, to register CMS to go and set all of the, whether it's network settings, we that can take control of the display so we can make sure the display is on when it's supposed to be. All of that comes through an Active Network Manager and that's the toolset that enables it. It's really IT team-focused. So whoever it is, we don't do anything with content. We don't do anything with that. Never have, never will. We're strictly focused on having a robust technology stack and a toolset that enables the IT team to manage effectively. So an Active Network Manager is the heart of all of that, right? And, facilitates a lot of the kinds of a lot of customer interaction with the platform and the user experience that I've been describing.  So 10 years ago when you started developing that a lot of the CMS companies had either no or pretty thread bear device management capabilities within their software. You had companies like Diversified who had kick-ass device management way, way back then, but a lot of these guys have caught up now. So are these parallel things or can they work together? Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, I mean there's certainly management as we're describing it now is considered a necessity, so everybody has got on board. There are certain things baked into the CMS, some certain CMS offerings that have some device management. There are some things that we can do for various CMSs, like I mentioned, registration and plug and play and stuff like that. Yeah, and there are certainly third-party companies, good friends that just have a management platform for anything. So management has become ubiquitous. I think what differentiates what we're doing is we're really looking at it as a total platform. So it's the combination of hardware and software. It's the depth of integration that we're able to do by virtue of owning that entire ecosystem. So it just enables more. You can do more.  Sparing you all the technical details results in greater stability, greater security, and greater longevity of the network, and that's something that's different as well. We look at a successful network being 5+ years. So if we install the devices, we don't want them to be touched for five years. The current hardware is about 10 years old. It's obviously like iterations of that and it's not the same exact stuff but we have stuff that's been deployed that is the previous generation for 10+ years. So we look at a 5+ year lifespan. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think industry standards might be like two to three would be considered successful, without any major intervention. But we look at it as for at least five years. We wanna get the stuff out, we wanna manage it, we want it to physically work. We want to have the remote capabilities to make necessary changes without having to deploy people, and I'm careful with my words cuz we're gonna be releasing some stuff that even greater enhances that remote capabilities in the coming months.  Do you have metrics around fail rates, like people talk about 99.59s and all that sort of thing?  Erik DeGiorgi: It's funny you bring that up because we exchanged an email about potentially doing an article around that, and yeah so what I proposed and what we're looking at doing is we actually just did a full audit of every intervention last year that we had on the support side, and I think those kinds of numbers and statistics, it's almost cursory. It's just fine, how many .9999 can you put in? It's just, I don't think it really tells the story, and the story that I'm interested in telling and sharing, certainly with the industry is, yeah, the physical devices work. It's the stuff that works. Software is fairly stable, but it's usually like the interaction of things.  I'm just thinking through the kind of statistics that we pulled from last year. For as many actual hardware issues as there were, there were many more issues with something happening within the operating system, a software bug coming up. It was an interaction between, third-party software that we've integrated onto the devices. It was a failure in setup, in installation. There were so many.  Or stupid shit like the janitor unplugging the thing.  Erik DeGiorgi:  Oh, for sure. That happens. That's real life. It's absolutely real life.it's that it's someone going and stacking boxes on the device and having it burn up, you know what I mean? We've seen it all. I hope it doesn't come across that I'm trying to avoid answering your question. The complexity of these things, just tells a different story rather than, one out of a thousand failing every year, or even like MBTF, it's not even a really accurate way of analyzing things. I'm hoping that if we collaborate on that, we can share some insights on what is a company that's deployed this hardware and software like this for well over a decade and has tens of thousands of devices that are currently managing, what it actually looks like in the real world? And I'm excited to be able to share that.  So in January you're gonna do a brand refresh and push a revised proposition out there. How's all that gonna roll out?  Erik DeGiorgi: Well, with your assistance of course. So I think what we want to do and it is very consistent with what you're saying. Our legacy is that when people think of our company, they think of hardware, what we're doing and what we are, the company we are today is just so different. And it's really that entire ecosystem platform that we've created and we deploy, it's the way we interact with our customers throughout the lifetime of the deployments and the support and everything that we offer.  How we're going to do it? It's gonna be digital, so the look and feel of the company online is gonna be very different. We're going to be making announcements through all the industry publications. So we've got a hard date right now of January 17th, so we'll see if we make it. But we're hoping to put out a kind of industry-wide blast and when people sit down at their computers on that day, they see something that they haven't before.  All right. If people wanna know more, where did they find you online?  Erik DeGiorgi: MediaVueSystems.com  All right. Eric, thank you so much for taking the time with me.  Erik DeGiorgi: Dave, thanks for having me on.

If you've ever been the victim of a content management system (CMS), raise your hand. This week Chappell Ellison, Postlight's Associate Director of Digital Strategy, joins Gina and Chris to unpack their complicated relationships with CMSs. They talk about knowing when it's the right time to dump your current system, how you can move on from the trauma of past CMSs, and how to choose your next one.  Links: Chappell Ellison 

What is headless CMS? Why are more companies looking into it nowadays? Powered by greater flexibility and scalability, it might be the next generation of content management systems. Lidia Infante, Senior SEO Manager at Sanity.io, joined me on the SEJ Show to explain how headless CMS works and how it can be particularly beneficial for ecommerce businesses. I don't have to build every page. I create the content in a core database, a central source of truth. And then, I deploy it following a template.–Lidia Infante, [16:00] I think there's a little bit of a misconception about headless. A lot of people out there, the conversations I'm having with people that are not tech SEOs is they feel that just utilizing a headless means that it's automatically going to be faster, quicker, and a better experience. –Loren Baker, [25:15] For most ecommerce sites, I would recommend going with a headless solution, especially if you're on a direct-to-consumer side with a big brand.–Lidia Infante, [45:09] [00:00] - Lidia's background. [10:36] - What is headless CMS & how is it helpful? [17:20] - Do you build from scratch in a headless environment? [22:00] - Are headless CMS quicker? [26:00] - SEO optimizations in headless. [31:30] - Other benefits of using a headless CMS system. [36:00] - How well does AI content rank in it? [39:52] - Where does Lidia see headless going in the next four to five years? [44:45] - What kind of business should look into headless CMS? [49:59] - How important is JavaScript? Resources mentioned: https://www.sanity.io/shopify https://www.sanity.io/sej - Free boosted Sanity plan for SEJ readers https://www.dangler.co.uk/   Regarding SEO and other stuff you can do, I think the main pain point that Headless solves is content velocity.–Lidia Infante, [28:00] Headless CMS can guide you a little bit more when it comes to optimizing web performance. Different headless CMSs will help you achieve amazing core web vitals differently.–Lidia Infante, [26:19] B2C brands need to ensure that the experience they provide on their website is not the typical ecommerce experience of title, product, picture, price, and description. It's more similar to the experience they can provide in a shop. –Lidia Infante For more content like this, subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/searchenginejournal Are you looking to keep up with current and effective digital marketing today? Check out https://www.searchenginejournal.com for everything you need to know within the digital marketing space and improve your skills as an internet marketer. Connect with Lidia Infante: Lidia Infante is a consultant, writer, and speaker who has been working to help businesses grow their reach through SEO in European markets, the US, and Australia. She got her start on the business side of things through psychology, allowing for organic growth strategies that are now driving ecommerce sites' success! As part of her passion for SEO, she enjoys regularly participating in podcasts and webinars in the SEO community. She writes about international strategy, digital business, and women's rights on her website. Connect with Lidia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lidiainfante/ Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LidiaInfanteM Visit her website: https://www.lidia-infante.com/ Connect with Loren Baker, Founder of Search Engine Journal: Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/lorenbaker Connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenbaker

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Appspace has now been active in this industry for 20 years, and through much of that time the software company was one of the larger players in a crowd of companies all chasing the general business opportunity of digital signage. But in the last few years the company has pivoted, in a big way, to the well-defined vertical of workplace. The company now describes itself as a workplace experience platform for both physical and digital workplaces. Digital signage is still a main component of what Appspace does, but just one of several in a unified platform. I caught up with Thomas Philippart de Foy, who has been with Appspace for a decade and is now the EVP of Product Innovation. In our chat, we get into what took Appspace down the workplace path, and then how it all works within an organization. The company has a PILE of users and says its software is in place at roughly 200 of the companies listed in the Fortune 500. But it also offers free accounts to smaller users, drafting off the well-used concept of freemium software - allowing people to try before they buy. If you are looking at workplace - either as a vendor or as an HR, IT or ops person, listen and learn. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Thomas, thank you for joining me. You've been with Appspace for a very long time, right?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Just celebrating 10 years in September!  Oh, okay, and we first met a number of years ago in Dubai, but then you moved to Costa Rica, which was a bit of a pivot, but now you're in Belgium for a holiday, right? Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. I relocated to Costa Rica to get closer to the US time zone while still enjoying tropical weather. You don't get tropical weather in Antwerp or wherever you're in Belgium?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Rarely, once a year in the summer, there's a good day, and then the rest is rainy.  And you don't like that?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Once a year, maybe.  So Appspace, that's a company that's been around for a very long time. When I first got to know Appspace, it was very much a general digital signage CMS platform, you know, “What are you doing? We can help you out!” And you were, at that time I believe, working pretty closely with Cisco, but in the last few years you could, you very much seem to have become a company that's all about workplace experience and digital signage is one of your outputs as opposed to being a pure digital signage company.  Is that a fair assessment?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Absolutely. We're celebrating our 20 years anniversary this month, so such a big milestone, and the firs 15-16 years was really building a cloud-based CMS for digital signage. We had some mission statements. We wanted to be hardware agnostic, OS agnostic. We wanted to be cloud first, and then a few years back, we started expanding our offering and went into the room scheduling worlds, where a lot of other companies were playing, and just added that as a feature. Then just two years ago, Summer 2020, one of our biggest customers on the West Coast came over to us and said, “Hey, we're looking to return to the office after the pandemic. We need help in providing our users with an app that would allow them to reserve workspaces, comply with security policies and so forth.” And we decided to get onto that journey and build a product, and six months later we launched. So January 2021 and 30 days later, we signed one of the biggest tech companies as a customer, and from there it's been quite a ride.  Did the company go towards workplace because it looked like an opportune vertical to be in, or was it what the customers who you touching or asking for and it pulled you that way? Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, in the last 10 years, I spent a lot of time meeting with customers and trying to understand their challenges and see where Appspace could help them. In this scenario, the customer came over and they had a real challenge, which we saw many other companies would have, and there was really no one in the market that had an answer for it two years ago. So we thought that's an opportunity in which we could really put some focus, leverage our existing enterprise grade platform, cloud-first experience and credibility in our large enterprise customer base to just go and expand the use case.  Really, we also see that there is a correlation happening with workplace communication and workplace management. It's not gonna be two different things, it's actually gonna be one, and we thought we could come from our workplace communication expertise and go that direction while probably some more workplace management products would probably start moving towards workplace communication, and there would be a consolidation. You also acquired a company called Beezy, which was all about the workplace as well, right?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, when we entered workplace management, we also launched our employee app, and from there, we got a lot of requests from customers to focus on employee communication in the app itself, and we met with Beezy, they had a very similar company culture, they had a good size and they had a product which was very modern, very forward looking and built on Microsoft SharePoint, and we thought that would nicely align with our product platform and our vision, so that's been a very fun journey, onboarding them into the Appspace world for the last few months.  Now is Beezy still a brand, or is it that their IP and their capabilities are rolled into Appspace?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: We're rolling them into Appspace step by step. The brands are consolidating under a single brand. Now, it's the Appspace Modern Internet by Beezy, but we are clearly focusing on aligning all the different teams under a single organization, and also the brand and the product will be one.  We definitely don't wanna run two separate products. We've always had that philosophy that with Appspace, it was one platform and features and not multiple point products so we're gonna continue doing that.  There are digital science CMSs that say that the workplace is one of the verticals that they're in, and then there are companies that just do room booking software, and maybe the displays hardware as well, they blend those together. There are hot desk companies and everything else. I'm thinking, like in a lot of other vertical markets, that the end user really doesn't wanna have to cobble together an overall solution that features all these different components and different companies doing them, they'd rather just have one company doing it all. Is that a fair statement? Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yes, and the pandemic has accelerated the need for platforms versus point products.  Pre-pandemic on the workplace management, you had the IWMS to manage all your assets, you had room booking solutions for the room scaling panels, you had visitor management solutions to bring visitors into the office. There were all point products, and then on the workplace comm, you had digital signage that was a point product, you had kiosks often very close to digital signage, and then you had email publishing, you had intranet. All of those were point products as well. I think what we're seeing now is they're unifying on both sides. So you're starting to see vendors who offer room booking, hot desking, visitor management, and then on the other side, you've got companies who are starting to consolidate and acquire, and they're doing digital signage, employee app, intranet, email publishing, and what we're doing is both at the same time, which is probably our biggest unique differentiator. We believe, if you have an employee app, it's not only about employee communication or workplace management, it's the two combined. So a single app on users' devices versus multiple apps. And I assume that resonates well with the business communicators and the IT people within a company, because they don't wanna have to deal with all these different logins and back in and out stuff?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: I guess there's two sides to it. There's certainly the administrative side to it, but there's also the user adoption. A big part of the return to the office is implementing new tools for employees to reserve access into a building, reserve a meeting room or a desk, and comply with formalities, that's for sure. But the other side of it is how do you communicate with those employees? How do you let them know what are the new rules in place? What are the new policies? How do you communicate what are the new benefits in the office, the new technology available?  So being able to communicate in the same app that you're actually gonna reserve your workspace, invite your visitors, makes a lot of sense, and I think that's what HR and Corp comms are really liking with our story is that one app will do it all and it will of course integrate with all their backend systems and so forth. So if I am a business communicator at a large corporation and I want to address these issues, what can you do for them and how does it work?  Are they buying an enterprise license? Is it cloud based or are they installing something on prem, and how does it all come together? Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, it's a great question and it's a big one and there's two sides to it. Once again on one side, you've got the admin, the console is fully cloud based, you don't need to install any software on your desktop, and you can start by just going on Appspace.com, create a free account and you get a full featured Appspace environment. We don't monetize features, we monetize users and devices. So even with a free account, you'll have all the features of Appspace, but you'll be limited in the number of users that can log into the app and the number of devices that you can register back. So it's the whole idea of Freemium?  I just wanted to ask because “free” is intriguing to me. You don't see that very much in digital science anymore, unless it's entry level super limited in what it does and so on, but you're doing free with the idea of onboarding people, getting them used to the system and them realizing, I like this and I'm willing to pay for it?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, so what we think is that in order to be successful with Freemium, you need to have a platform that's really self-service, and I think that's what we focused a lot over the last 10 years is simplifying the product to the point where someone who just goes on our website, creates a free account, in 30 seconds is in the Appspace account, able to register a device, create some awesome content, publish it to the device and it's working, and we were able to do that for digital signage, but then we were able to expand that into all the digital communication channels and also for workplace management.  So we maintained Freemium when a lot of other companies started thinking, “That doesn't work for us, let's go back to a trial account with someone hand holding you.” We don't need that with Appspace, you can get started, and so we have a huge amount of customers that create free accounts every month, and then when they're ready to expend, they just need to click on the link and they get in contact with a Sales rep and they can just either swipe their credit card or work through one of our partners to buy a subscription. Is that a huge amount of free signups every month? Are there no maintenance until they actually contact a Sales rep and say, “I'm interested in paying for this”?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. They're touchless most of the time.  We have very large organizations that will have a lot of different free accounts, different departments, different team members who will create free accounts and get started, and then when they're ready to move and they want to do the security assessment and they want to talk contract and large scale deployments, they reach out to us.  So I guess your sales people might look at big tech company, X and see that they have five different free accounts in different departments, and the salesperson could go to them and say, “Guys, you're using a lot of this now, do you wanna harmonize it?”  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah. Our sales team, for sure, we also have a big marketing organization now. The product is also supported, so when you log into Appspace, you will have certain steps to follow to register a device, create content. It's the system that is holding your hand, not users. And then along the way, you will have opportunities to get help, to talk to people. You can go to the knowledge center. Our Sales reps are already really there to help customers get to the next level, which makes it nice because when our Account Executives talk to customers, they already have a good understanding of what the customer has been doing with Appspace and they can really jump right into it.  What happens when you have potential new customers who already have some sort of a room booking system and scheduling system, and they like them.  Do you have APIs where you can just continue to work with them or do they have to abandon that and go entirely with Appspace? Thomas Philippart de Foy: No, so we have open APIs, fully documented and online for every feature of our product. So we're happy to integrate with existing solutions that the customer may have still under contract or they're happy with it. What we're seeing though is very quickly customers consolidate because they see an opportunity for cost savings, for ease of management. And then, you know the story of a unified platform, if you have an integration with an emergency system or your building management system and the fire alarm goes on, you can broadcast that message to a digital sign, to a visitor management kiosk, to a room scheduling panel inside the room on the video device, and that can be done really easily when you're using a platform. It's much harder to achieve when you're using point products, because you need to integrate each point product with a security system and many don't even support that concept of broadcast.  So what we're seeing is when customers onboard Appspace for one use case, they very quickly start seeing the opportunity to save money, ease operations, and then benefit from the platform features and capabilities.  Are you able to provide analytics?  I've heard about this in the past where you start to get a sense of how a workplace is being used and where people are dwelling and how often rooms actually get booked and how many people are in the rooms, and it helps to size and maybe rethink some of the meeting spaces that a company may have. Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, so analytics and reporting is huge, and it's actually for the two sides of the product: for the workplace communication, understanding how users are interacting with content, whether it's on the app, on their phone, on their desktop, whether it's on a kiosk.  We have this concept of a corporate Netflix. We've had that for yours where users can actually browse content on demand, very much like you browse your video content on Netflix. You do that with the remote control, with a touch panel, whatever the interaction you want to use. We track all of that, and that gives a lot of analytics on how content is being consumed, the success of a campaign and so forth. And then on the workplace management, we have the analytics of what are the most active users, what type of workspace they book? How long do they sit at a desk? How long do they use a meeting room? If the meeting room for 10 people was booked, but used by two people, we have that data, so you can size your resources accordingly based on demand.  And then you can visualize everything inside Appspace, but we also created integrations into Tableau, into Power BI. So customers can actually export the data and visualize it in their preferred data visualization tool.  And in a workplace, the Power BI and Tableau stuff is interesting. I'm curious, are workplaces now much more sophisticated to where they see digital signage and visual communications as doing a lot more than congratulating somebody on their birthday or their 20th year with the company or whatever it may be. They're getting into visualizing KPIs in real time and that sort of thing? Thomas Philippart de Foy: Oh, yes, for sure. The number of customers that display building analytics when you enter the building, when you get on the first floor, where you can see the floor plan, you can see the heat maps, you can see the air quality, you can see the average temperature of the neighborhood. That certainly is a very common use case nowadays, providing building insights to users on digital signs is becoming really exciting.  I think what we're seeing is a huge opportunity of combining workplace management and workplace communication is when you now have context to where digital signage can help, and you know that in the retail world, there's been a bunch of vendors who've monitored gender, age, ethnicity in order to manage communication campaign to those audience and measure also. In workplace management, you don't really care about age or gender. But what you do care is which user is sitting where, and when you've got a majority of salespeople sitting in a neighborhood, can you actually change the content to relate to those people? And that's been something that we've done a lot over the last year and a half is creating that context of digital signage experience, where even though I'm going back into an office where it's a hot desking hotel, the content still speaks to me, because the system is aware that I'm gonna be sitting there, and I think that's huge, because in those days you used to know exactly where people were sitting so you were planning your content for the sales team based on where people were sitting. Now, the system will automate that process based on the data they get from their workplace management feature. And they're not using computer vision or things like that? Because when I come in to work at an office, I have to book a specific desk, and that's how you know that I'm there, right?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Either because you're booking a specific desk or you're sitting at a specific desk, and when you're actually sitting, we are able to identify who you are, and therefore dynamically say what's interesting to you is more sales data or more product marketing data, and therefore we mush multiple channels of content together to provide a perfect playlist that matches the audience.  But how do you know I'm at that desk?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's where workplace technology comes, whether it's smart docking stations, whether it's physically connecting into the network and passing the user identity, whether it's those new video devices that we see popping left and right on the desks. It could be when you have a desk puck, which is similar to a room scheduling panel, you arrive and you will scan the QR code with your phone and authenticate and check into a desk and say, this is now my desk. So we have a lot of different tools that allows us to identify the user and therefore to get that data that we need to personalize the workspace environment.  Through the pandemic, particularly in the first months, there was all kinds of discussion about how the workplace was gonna change, because those workplaces were being hollowed out through lockdowns and so on, and there's been all kinds of discussions and debate and everything else, particularly in the last six months or so, is where workplaces have started to repopulate as to whether it really did change all that much, and whether everybody's just working from home or everybody's into a hybrid thing.  You're on the ground, so to speak, you're dealing with companies who are implementing this stuff. What's your sense of what's actually happening?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: I think companies are worried that people are not coming back to the office as quickly as they had hoped they would, and although many companies during the pandemic said that they would not require employees to go back to the office. It's very different two years later, we realize how the workplace culture is important, and having people, if not every day, at least a few days a week, come into the office and meet their teammates and so forth. So we're now seeing a sense of urgency from many customers to find ways to convince people to go back to the office and that comes with offering a new experience, offering new services.  The new experience is making sure that regardless of where I sit in the building, I have the building talking to me, the building is aware that I'm there and being able to personalize that experience, and I think that's where digital signage is playing such a critical role. But then in the employee app, when I'm booking a room or when I'm booking a desk, I may need different types of services, maybe I need different technology, or maybe I want catering services. I should be able to do that from the app and reserve this ahead of time, and we're seeing a lot of demand around those new experiences where employees will get more benefits when they come to the office, not only benefits of a better physical workplace, but also benefits in terms of the services that are offered, and that will incentivize them to come back into the office, and then naturally, as people will come back to the office, they will meet their teammates again, and they will see why it's so important to meet in person, and that will create a dynamic, and at some point I think we'll get back to somewhat a normal situation where most people will go to the office more regularly. Did the pandemic accelerate something that, from your perspective, was going to happen anyways and just speed it up out of necessity, or were there a lot of companies that weren't really thinking about changing how their workplaces were experienced?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's a great question. I actually think the pandemic gave the opportunity for large organizations to make a cultural change in the workplace that was planned, but maybe seen as a 5-10 years initiative, and they were able to do it in 2 years.  Hot-desking in hotels is an example. We've been talking about hotels and hot-desking for years, but no one was able to implement it. It was such a big cultural change. The pandemic gave the opportunity for companies to take the decision, to reduce real estate and implement hot-desking in hotels, and they had a good reason for that, and for employees, it was like a natural thing that was happening. It would have taken years to get there otherwise. That's why no one was really focusing on the technology for it.  I also think that the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of apps, like Microsoft Teams. Many companies were still using Skype for Business and other tools and they were struggling to unify under a modern app like Microsoft Teams or Slack or WebEx, and this gave them the opportunity to do that, and by doing that, all employees now have one common app on their personal device, whether it's a phone or a desktop, they're able to communicate, chat, exchange files, and we've just launched our embedded app for Teams. So now you have Appspace embedded in Teams, which means users don't need to download a new app to reserve their workspaces or receive team communication. They have all of it inside one app, and I think that's an acceleration that's a result of the pandemic.  We obviously saw how Zoom and Microsoft and WebEx grew from that. That has also helped in the adoption of new technology, like workplace management and employee comms.  Yeah, I was curious about that because if you have all these other workplace tools, the next logical thing to integrate into there would be video conferencing, but that's that's an entirely different business and pretty damn complicated. So the easier path would be to integrate with something like Teams, right? Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. I think Teams offer the framework to embed an app fully into Teams, handle the authentication for the user, and then from there, we have so much insights on what the user needs that we're really able to personalize the experience. The Teams embedded app is a huge win for customers because if you think of a very large service organization with 200,000 desk workers, rolling out a new app for communication and for workplace management is a big challenge. Getting users to download the app or deploying the app to their personal device, enabling user authentication, tracking how users are actually logging in the app. This is no longer a challenge when you are embedded in Teams, because one morning you wake up and on your sidebar, you've got a new button, you click on it and that's where you reserve your workspace, that's where you see your workplace communication, all of it in an app that you were already logging in every morning.  So I'm a CTO at a very large tech company, and if I'm a CTO, the company's going down, but regardless of that, if I'm sitting across from you and I say, “okay, this is interesting, make me comfortable that this is secure.” What do you tell me?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: We obviously work with close to two hundred of the Fortune 500 companies, so we're used to working with very large organizations that have very strict security requirements, and our product (the cloud service) is already approved by IT, by Security and enabled whether it's for digital signage or room booking or visitor for one of the features.  Enabling suddenly to turn on the other features doesn't require any more security assessment because the product has been approved. We also have only one app, whether you are running our app on a system on a chip display, on a kiosk, on an iPad, it's the same app in a different container. And this means that once you have your app approved for one of the use cases, your app is actually approved for all the other use cases. That's again been strengths on our side is trying to keep it single simple platform that allows you to really very quickly scale this across your organization. One thing that's come up a lot in the last couple years is digital science companies who addressed some of the ideas of remote work by having, in effect, a network screensaver, something that would push out to home based workers and pop messaging on a screen and all that. Are you doing that sort of thing, and if so, is it widely adopted?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, it's a little bit what we started doing five years ago inside meeting rooms on video devices. When the video device is not used for video conferencing, pop up a screensaver and its Appspace, it's running natively on the client and it will display all the important communication. In the case of a meeting room, we're targeting a wider audience.  Now, when you run our UWP app on a Windows device, we obviously know who is the owner of that device, so we're able to personalize the content. Now, I see this as an interesting use case for screensavers. Although I've never seen someone sitting in front of his laptop watching a screensaver as they do a digital sign, drinking a coffee, but I do like the experience of: you're running the Appspace app on the desktop, it's in screensaver mode. When you plug in your laptop in the office or at home, it pops up the experience where as a user, you can say, “Hey, I'm working from home” or “I'm in the office”, and that then trickles into a whole series of events that makes your colleagues, your teammates aware of where you are working from today, are you in the office and so forth.  So screensaver for just pure content playlist, that's really easy to achieve, but I don't know that this is a huge benefit and a huge win, but coupling that with workplace management can be really interesting. Yeah, I do like the idea of being able to instant message somebody in a way, other than an email, but you're right. If I was working for a large company and I was sitting at home and there was something steadily popping up on the screen telling me about Millie's birthday or Bob's retirement or whatever, I'd be looking very hard to figure out some way to disable it.  Thomas Philippart de Foy: One thing we did though, is we worked with a big law firm in Canada, and the CIO managed to convince the partners to move from a physically assigned office to a hot office, if you will. Very challenging, because lawyers and partners are very conventional. They like their workspace environment. They want their corner office. And what the CIO was able to convince is there would be new sacrifice in the personal experience and to do that, they put in every office, a digital sign, 55 inch display coupled with video or not, depending on the office profile. Outside the office, there is an office scheduling panel.  The partner from home is able to reserve on their Appspace app, “Hey, I need an office from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM and these are the amenities I need.” They reserve that workspace, and when they come into the office, they actually check on the panel outside or on their phone and the digital sign instantly switches to their personal channel. They have potentially their practice news, maybe their preferred sports news, and also their family pictures that they want, and they've just personalized that office with content for the partners and that made them really excited because now they had a big 55 inch display showing their practice news or their family pictures instead of those little frames on the desk that would take the dust. I think when technology really increases the user experience and doesn't sacrifice anything, I think this works really well as a home office as well. If you have an extra display and you can use that real estate, that makes sense, but let's not be mistaken, people care about themselves primarily, they want information that's relevant to them. If I'm at home, I don't know that I want this birthday of a colleague, but I wouldn't mind having pictures of a year ago from my family and kids that I celebrated, maybe that's more useful for me.  We haven't talked about back of house and all the discussions around being workplace, as it relates to an office, are you doing work in production areas and industrial areas and so on? Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah. So if you remember, we acquired a company called The Marlin Company a couple of years ago, and their main focus was industrial. A very large amount of customers in that space, and we've been working a lot with those customers in transitioning from digital signage, which was a normal evolution of printed posters to digital content and focus a lot around safety and workplace wellbeing and so forth to communicate on personal devices.  Now, frontline workers typically don't have a company email address. So how do they log into the app? So we combine digital signage with the employee app. Digital signage will say, “Hey, there's a new employee app. To access the app, scan this QR code!” User scans the QR code on their phone, enters an employee ID and a phone number and a few seconds later, they get a one time password to create their credentials and they are now logged into the same app as the desk workers with different feature sets, but it's the same app, and now they also have the ability to have employee communication, team communication. They can chat, they can react socially and comment on the content the same way anyone else.  This is breaking the barrier between the desk workers and the frontline workers where really the frontline workers who didn't have a lot of the technology stack because they didn't have a company email address, where everyone has a smartphone so why wouldn't they have the same benefits? And that one time password, no email login has been huge win for us and for our customers in making sure every employee is aligned and has access to the same capabilities.  Last question, this conversation flew by. What's the installed footprint for Appspace at this point?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: It's always hard to say because we count users. We evaluate that around 10 million users benefit from Appspace around workplace management and workplace communication today. We have around 2,500 customers, two hundred of the Fortune 500, and deployments that will scale on the screen size between 50 screens and 10,000 screens for a single customer. And on the user side, our largest deployment is 175,000 users logging into our app to receive team communication or reserve workspaces. So very large deployments. We like to focus on large customers, but with the Marlin acquisition, we were able to really get into the industrial segment where you have a lot of smaller organizations, maybe not always smaller in terms of number of workers, but maybe smaller in terms of number of physical workspaces. Yeah. All right, this was great. I learned a lot, which is, I guess the point. Thomas Philippart de Foy: That was great. Thank you so much for giving us the time. 

On the podcast today we have Felix Arntz. Felix is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google and a WordPress core committer. He is the lead engineer for the Site Kit plugin for WordPress and has been a regular contributor to WordPress for several years. He's also been involved in the newly created WordPress performance team which is trying to work out how WordPress can stay ahead of the performance curve. He's on the podcast today to talk about how the WordPress community need to be focussing more on performance. Not only do search engines place more emphasis upon speed, but the rise of other CMSs might also reflect their ability to optimise their platforms, given that they don't have the plugin and theme architecture which WordPress does. It's an interesting conversation about an area which is going to matter more and more in the months and years to come.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT If a company wants to hang its business hat on the proposition that it is very good at visualizing real-time data to screens, it helps to have a big, very familiar client that heavily uses that sort of thing. A small New York City start-up called Zignage has that in the New York Stock Exchange - providing and maintaining a platform that shows the numbers and trends charting on screens around the hyper-kinetic trading floor in Wall Street. The company grew out of an NYU media lab and spent its first few years working mostly behind the curtains, developing signage and data-handling capabilities to software firms and end-user clients. But a few years ago, the company made the decision to develop a brand and start selling its data-centric capabilities directly to end-users. I had a great chat with Alex Epshteyn, the CEO and Founder of the company, about how it got started, where its headed, who it all serves, and how there can be a huge gulf between software shops that can take a number from a shared data table somewhere, and running mission-critical, hyper-secure visualizations on a stock exchange floor. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Alex, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Zignage is all about, how they started and how long you've been around?  Alex Epshteyn: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Dave. Zignage started in 2009 formally, and we started at the NYU Incubator while I was doing my graduate work at the Media Lab in NYU and suffice to say the company was more interesting than the graduate works. So I started doing that, even though I'm from the east coast and this doesn't typically happen, it kinda happened here. So initially, conceptually, we were gonna get into the digital out home space and we were gonna build an auction backend that people can bid for spots on digital signs. So kinda a slightly novel idea, especially in digital signage and we couldn't do a big enough raise, and then we found a number of these sort of remnant advertising platforms coming into the market and we decided, since I have a pretty good little black book of enterprise clients, and we built the platform to about 50% at that point, in mid to end of 2009, let's try our hand at some enterprise folks, and what ended up happening is a trajectory that basically pushed us for about eight years, which is we built a middleware and a toolkit, essentially our own toolkit, that enabled us to build very quickly CMSs and builds and anything related to that, data bindings for third party systems like CRM systems and CRP systems, a variety of backends essentially, and we essentially entered OEM space. So we built products for other companies. Some of them were large, some of them were small. We had a tremendous amount of NDAs and non-competes, as you can imagine. These companies would not like you to advertise your own stuff while you were building it for them and typically we would have maybe one or two of these customers at the same time. So from 2009 to about 2017, maybe a little bit later even, we basically did work for third parties and we built a lot of different solutions, and around 2018, we decided that we were gonna attempt to productize. That means, essentially build our own, front facing, become a brand, and move away from a pure sort of project solution, even though we had a product in there. But it was a product for us, not so much for the end customer and to get into the market and so we did, and in the meanwhile we had two direct customers during almost all the time. NYU was one. We had a number of schools at NYU that we were able to pitch, and successfully had running, so NYU Law School, NYU Engineering School, where I was a student and then NYSE where we initially partnered Thomson Reuters. So Thomson Reuters did the data and, most of the application stack actually, and what we provided is a device management framework and advanced players to run the WebGL and all the other things that they needed to run for the New York Stock Exchange. This was under the NYSE-Euronext regime, which has since been bought by the Intercontinental Exchange. This was in 2017, which was a formative year for us. As I mentioned, NYSE under the new ownership came to us and said, “Look, Thomson Reuters is relatively expensive and essentially they're reselling us their data, how about you guys take on their responsibility?” You get nine months to replicate and you get this support contract that basically takes over for them, at a discount for them but it was a nice option for us.  We took on the challenge. Because we were able  in these intermittent years we built up so much experience and know how to deal with realtime sources, realtime data sources, and WebGL specifically to make things pretty bulletproof whereas perhaps some other HTML5 technology that is fairly popular in digital signage would is maybe not robust or maybe not as performant. So we took that toolkit and applied it to over essentially at the New York Stock Exchange and took the contract over and successfully we did that. So at the New York Stock Exchange today, they're actually running two separate solutions from us. They have our more standard on print solution for their marketing group and then they have a much more customized, almost like an OEM version for their trading real time data, which are now classed as a number of financial data widgets.  So if I'm at the NYSE and I'm looking down on the floor, or I'm walking around the floor with all the guys with the funny jackets and everything, those various dashboard screens that I see with all the pricing indicators and everything else, that's all being driven by you? Alex Epshteyn: That is correct. So everything essentially above the workstation level, everywhere above the trader level, if you just look up above the 5'8” level from the ground, you'll basically be looking at our solutions. It actually is a full gambit of our capabilities. We have synchronized video, real time widgets for financial data consumption, charting types of things and a lot of different ticker technologies that we've custom built and some of our generic ones, and streaming as well. The only other company that works with us at the site is Haivision, so they provide the backend system and supplementary streaming solutions. So we consume their feeds and also feed them.  They're a video distribution company?  Alex Epshteyn: That's right. So we're actually partnered with them. So they're one of our partners in space. We like working with them, they are a nice Canadian company to say the least and I know some of the original folks that sort of constituted the company and they have grown as a company tremendously through the years. So we really like working with them.  Yeah, this must have been a really big holy shit moment for you guys when you got that deal because it's not like winning a hundred locations QSR chain or something, this is the New York Stock Exchange. It's on the TV every day with endless photos and everything else, and it's mission critical. Like you can't say, oh, we're just doing a software update and we'll be back in 10 minutes? Alex Epshteyn: Indeed, and the escalations we get are pretty hardcore. We have just a few minutes to get things going, and philosophically, we try to blend some aspects of redundancy with a lot of resiliency because redundancy itself, some folks who deal with these sorts of mission critical situations, could itself present its own set of problems, right? So you want the system, the platform itself to be as resilient or high availability as possible to use a term out of the server space.  So yeah, it was a huge thing for us and ultimately, we specialized in a lot of financial services and non-retail banking is a more generic category or an area we do very well in and we work with some integrators in the space that are known for it as well in terms of channel. Currently our CTO is actually the chief architect of the Thompson Reuter solution. He came on board with us a year ago, a year and a half ago as a full time hire. He was a consultant for many years after Thomson Reuters got customization space, and he worked with us for a long time and then finally our CTO to do other stuff, and Steve came on board. So we're very well positioned for this work.  So for your company, if you had to do an elevator pitch saying what all you do, what do you rattle off for them? Alex Epshteyn: I think what we would do is, as you mentioned, mission critical type of usages, whichever vertical, right? We've done things with SCADA. We've done things in transportation that I wish I was at liberty to say, maybe soon, and it doesn't have to just be financial data. It could be sports feeds. It could be building services, things of that sort that are critical for the use. That's one of our specialty points.  The other is, I would say, while we're very happy to have relationships with a number of hardware companies, we still have really some high end hardware that we field. So what we do is, for very demanding applications, not necessarily mission critical ones, but those overlap obviously, we provide a full-stack solution, and these players, we're getting into the realm of show control type of players, really beefy and professional level graphics capabilities. So we do sell those. Those are fully our stack, and this way we can guarantee basically the solution as opposed to having us do a certain portion system integrated to another and so forth.  The last thing I would say is while we still support some level of OEM work, we currently have two customers that we work with. Our business model changed a bit in the last three years of supporting them. We have our standard SaaS business and in some cases we modified it for on-prem. So it's already flexible, but we also have a platform as a service offering to really support those OEM customers. So it's a lot less expensive in volume, very scalable, and I would say those are the things that really make us stand out. It's real time data, data visualization, full-stack solution with hardware to do very difficult things often, and finally, configuration where people assume real, ad-hocs customization. There's an assumption there, right? If you're doing something very bespoke, the assumption there is that it's gonna be insanely expensive and take a long time to build and that's true if you haven't built two dozen variants of it and you don't have a toolkit to basically assemble it from parts like a LEGO set, which we do. I would assume that your calling card when you go in to talk to opportunities, when you can say, yeah, we do the New York Stock Exchange, we do all the data handling on that, and you could imagine it's more than a little bit secure and mission critically oriented. I suspect that makes the target customers feel pretty comfy? Alex Epshteyn: It does, and even before them, it makes consultants who put us on the bid lists and generally are interested in finding parties that can actually fulfill the scope, call us. So we don't really advertise much, and that's gonna change, I think, maybe next year. We're gonna do maybe a marketing splash at some point next year.  Right now, it's all word of mouth, and we do get a lot of calls. There's a lot of projects we actually pass on because they're not in our sweet spot and they're distractions, but the projects that we do take on are often difficult. We even do work in retail, as I mentioned to you, and the types of deals we take in are always really heavy data integration, visualization, where they are very automated workflows, there's almost no humans involved where the humans are basically special events, and then the system essentially corrects for automation again.  Yeah, I've been writing about data visualization for 6-7 years now, and when I started writing about it, it was pretty rare and beyond FIDS displays and things like that but it's now pretty standard. I'm curious because you guys are obviously super deep and experienced in that area, when you see all the other software companies saying, yeah, we do real time data, we can do realtime data handling, we can integrate, we have APIs and this and that.  When you get into a conversation with a prospect, how do you distinguish what you do versus other companies who say, yeah we do all that too, cuz I suspect it's different?  Alex Epshteyn: It is. One of the first things we've put on a table is that we can mostly guarantee our resolution time SLA, nobody else can pretty much. Most people will be aggressive, pick up the phone and work the problem, but the way that our stuff is built, we can fix the problem. We can guarantee fixing the problem within a certain period of time. Now it's not inexpensive, sometimes it's actually affordable for a lot of types of businesses where a fully custom solution would not be.  The other one is that most data visualization takes a lot of shortcuts, it really leverages, not to get too deep in technicalities unless you want me to, basically JavaScript and CSS, the mainstay of HTML5. But all of our data visualizations are built in WebGL. It's like the difference between driving a car on the road and driving a bullet train on tracks, right? There's no interruptions to the bullet train. It'll just go and it'll be on schedule. There's no interruptions. There's no jitter. There's no movement. That sort of paradigm. So we like to guarantee behavior of our data visualization, especially dynamic like charting or graphing libraries that we use and implement. It's actually extremely difficult to build something that you would think is easy like a ticker or crawler.  Whatever data that's feeding it, I'm sure we both have probably seen a lot of instances where it stutters, it has problems, it doesn't refresh on time and doesn't deal well with different fonts and whatnot. That's just not true of our solution. Our solution is, I would say, cutting edge on dynamic data visualization.  So for an end user or for an integrator, they have to educate themselves that just because a company says they can do real time data doesn't mean they can really do it. That means they might be able to reflect a number that's in a data table and show it on a screen, and that's quite a bit different from what you're talking about.  Alex Epshteyn: It is and maybe the third aspect is most of the companies we work with already have accounts with the big data warehouse places like Refinitive, IBS, and a number of others, so we already are super familiar with these back ends. In fact, we have things that monitor the APIs. We routinely do a lot of monitoring of real time or just dynamic sources. So this is a huge value add in the industry, and I wish more providers would do that because ultimately, if you are a data fed platform, it's up to you to tell the customer something's failing on the back end because they won't know, they'll assume all sorts of things, but you need to critically have the tools inside to tell what's going on, and if you build it out in a smart way, you can also alert the right people at the right time that something's happening and to look into it. So you can be proactive about it. That's the third item, I'd say.  They also change like the schemas and everything without telling people, right? Alex Epshteyn: That's true. But it's a super exciting space. Once you have the core technology built out. You could really do a lot, in terms of, consuming this kind of data and I think generally, signage, we're in a slightly privileged position regarding this, but I think there's a move into industry towards generative and procedural content away from more Codec-heavy content. Although, there's obviously gonna be overlap for many years for both. We certainly support Codec playback in a variety of ways, synchronized, on different players and so forth, and there's nice innovations like AV1 coming onto the market nowadays. But you could do so much more with generative dynamic content, it's a big difference. For instance, we had a client that wanted us to expose much more of the controllability of a layout, standard design tool inside of our platform. Now, typically we would not wanna do that because there's some nice tools on the market like Premiere, like After Effects, real tools that they generally use. But the problem that certain customers power users I would say are having is they don't wanna have to export an After Effects file and have it encoded in something, that's time, that's sometimes money because they do it externally because they don't have a kit on-prem, or in the cloud.  So what we've done is basically have a simpler version of something like Adobe Premiere or After Effects that lets them make quick changes in some key framing or some transitory effects and they don't have to put the whole thing into a codec. So that seemed to really resonate with certain power users that we have and directionally, it's the area that we'd like to innovate in. Is it important to make a distinction between generative data for business applications and generative data for artwork? Because I see a lot of video walls out there that are set and forget. They're driven by generative data and it's just these abstract visuals that are swirl and kind of bloom and everything else, but that's very different from, I think what you're talking about, which is what on the screen in terms of charting or what appears is based on what the data is influencing, it's it's shaping what appears?  Alex Epshteyn: That's correct. A lot of general data is canned, right? It's almost like a video basically, and some experts, some design shops typically would change it for you, and it becomes evergreen content, day two, three, and day four. What we try to do is something a little bit different and we work with some really nice design companies as well. So just to be completely clear, we don't do the design ourselves. We typically either partner with a company that's really good at it. Sometimes the company brings us into the opportunity, right?  The consultant can also spec us to partner with somebody or the end client may have relationships with companies that do this very well. But, I would say the formulation, the recipe for this kind of thing, to make it dynamic is a few things, and that's where this sort of generative content becomes more like a Zignage type of problem, as opposed to something that you could hire a design house to basically build for you, right? One is that you could update content even if the filters or the generative piece is running. Separately you might be able to in CMS have the tools to change the filters of the generative option, just as I explained prior, and finally have trigger conditions. We do mostly casting, right? There are some great companies in space. I think they're very good at that kinda stuff. They do a lot of smart interactive signage. We do a little bit of that, but we mostly do narrowcasting. So in our world trigger conditions come from some sort of backend system. It could be a calendaring system, it could be something smarter, right? Where it's not just a boolean condition. It could be a multivariable that basically has to click off a list of things that can happen. And that's really where we can add a lot of value and it overlaps with the kinda work we do with the New York Stock Exchange. We generally term it as business logic So we really do some smart business logic and I think it's actually, there's a lot of growth in that area once we apply modern sort of machine learning to it to make it extensible to go further.  But with that kind of approach you have an ability to modify a piece of content continuously, right? It's a living piece of generative content, even if it's not dynamically fed with financial data sources, or sports data sources.  I haven't seen your user experience, but I'm guessing people listening to this are thinking, this is really interesting, but I'd be terrified to try to use this software. What's it actually like? Alex Epshteyn: You're not gonna be terrified because we are one of the proponents of nearly or fully automated systems. So often what we do for non-power users is to give a build out to the software that our customers use, and then everything is essentially this business logic that I'm describing to you.  It's kinda like a headless CMS? Alex Epshteyn: It's like a headless CMS for the non-power users. For the power users that really like their tools like Adobe, or you could just use a Dropbox or some sort of hotfolder mechanism. We're also partnered with a number of DAM solutions. There's a lot of workflow that happens in digital asset management solutions, including tag based workflows.  We do a lot of tag based workflows nowadays, where we consume the tags that are done in a DAM, and essentially they find their way onto the right players at the right time, and on the flip side, we do have a standard suite. It's actually going through a major overhaul at the end of the year, what we call Z Cast 6. It does have a number of these power tools. But our CMS generally follows a certain idea. It was popular for a while and it's hard to execute unless you have our kinds of customers, which is what we call an additive UX. So it's the opposite of something like Microsoft Office, right where you have a billion features and there's a long learning curve if you wanna learn everything. What we do is really try to identify the user story behind what needs to be done. We create the access controls that really expose certain parts of the CMS, and even within the same context, add or remove tools as needed. That creates a situation where there's almost really minimal training. I think one of the biggest problems we're trying to solve for our direct customers, or channel customers is the attrition that happens in major enterprises for users of digital signage, right? Like one of the biggest problems we face even in huge banks is the fact that digital signage is consigned to a webmaster subcategory. Like they manage the CMS that's published on their portal, and then somebody in that team or a few people in that team handles digital signage as well. So that's historically been a problem for our whole industry, and what we're trying to tackle is kinda remove both the friction of adoption and also try to give them the tools that they need, and if they use tools, bridge those tools, that's our philosophy on that end. So what's the structure of your company? Are you a private company?  Alex Epshteyn: We are a private company. We're an LLC in New York, and we're about 20 people. Most of our development used to take place until very recently in Ukraine because one of my partners and I from there originally. So as this topic is in the news, unfortunately, forget about our team. The fact is cities in the eastern part of Ukraine are partially destroyed but luckily a lot of the folks that we would use are in the Western part of Ukraine now, and we continue to use them but not all of them unfortunately. So you're having to manage your way through that along with other things, right?  Alex Epshteyn: We did, and they're very talented folks. We have worked on so many projects.  Yeah, it's interesting. I was trading LinkedIn messages with another company and he was talking about operating out of Odessa and they're still like opening QSRs and things like that and putting in menu boards.  Alex Epshteyn: Good for them. That's exactly what they should do.  Yeah, and I was thinking, boy, all the other challenges you have out there, like supply chain and everything else, layer in a hot war on top of that. Good lord. Alex Epshteyn: Our problems are very small compared to the real problems in Ukraine and the world. But it's a small world. You sort of face these things as they come.  Well, hopefully someway or other, it gets resolved. I'm not quite sure how, but this was great. Can you let people know where they can find your company online?  Alex Epshteyn: Sure. It's Zignage.com  So signage with a Z on the front?  Alex Epshteyn: Correct. The last word is Zignage. You find me on LinkedIn, Alex Epshteyn. That's where mostly we do our sort of minimum branding that we do.  All right, but we'll be looking for more later in the year, right?  Alex Epshteyn: Absolutely. We're excited to make some announcements in the transportation space, some more in the financial industry and some more in retail. All right. Great to hear it's going well for you. Thanks so much for spending the time with me. Alex Epshteyn: Thank you, Dave. My pleasure.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest, boldest and baddest technology news. This week we are not recording on a Tuesday as it's a regular week. Though we would add that Equity will be live on Thursday, when we record our Friday episode. So if you wanted to come hang, make sure that you are following the show on Twitter.Right, so what did we get into this morning?Stocks are generally up, major cryptos are not doing too much this morning, and a Coinbase downgrade caught our eye.Backstage Capital is laying off staff as it focuses on only investing into existing portfolio companies. With less capital than before going to Black founders, seeing a fund that focused on investing into underrepresented founders struggle is a bummer.The Strapi startup round was a fun one to look at, fusing open-source tech and CMSs, a tool that we use here at TechCrunch rather often.And then there is the mess at Digital World Acquisition Corp., the SPAC that wants to merge with former American President Trump's digital media company. It's in trouble with regulators.The chaos did not start there, however. 3AC is in default (like Russia!), the BlockFi rescue deal had internal pushback, Klarna may only be worth $10 billion, MilkRun loses lots of money, and we're learning more about how India's government is going after Twitter.So, a great way to start the week. We kid. Chat soon!

Jess told us about the toys she disassembled (and sometimes failed to reassemble) as a kid. She then spoke about her early dabbling with HTML, discovering IF statements and PHP. We then talked about writing vs. using CMSs, creating websites, working in teams, contracting and consulting, and finally about communities and Jess's Podcast: BaseCode. And as of the publication of this show, she is now a Laravel employee.Here are the links from the show:https://www.twitter.com/jessarchercodeshttps://github.com/jessarcherhttps://basecodefieldguide.com/podcast/https://www.twitter.com/gonedarkCreditsCover Heliotrope by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.Your host is Timothée (Tim) Bourguignon, more about him at timbourguignon.fr.Gift the podcast a rating on one of the significant platforms https://devjourney.info/subscribeBuzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREEDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the show

It's so easy to get caught up in what we do, be that logo design, vehicle wraps, websites, trade show booths; you name it. We forget that our clients don't live in the same world as we do. Our clients don't see the world through a designer's eye. When they look at a billboard, they see the message. When a designer looks at a billboard, not only do we take in the content and message. But we also take in the layout, the hierarchy, the use of negative space and the colour pallet. We note what fonts are used and what imagery they chose to relay their message. When we see something that isn't kerned correctly, we feel the need to point it out. We feel almost obliged to mention every stock image we recognize out in the wild. "See that photo of that happy family in that car insurance ad? I saw that exact photo on Depositphotos." And we stop to admire displays, posters, cards and everything else we think is well designed. After all, when you see something that you feel is well designed, don't you secretly start cataloging pieces of it away in your mind so you can “borrow” the idea for something you create in the future? As designers, our brains are just wired that way. We see the world through a designer's eye. But sometimes, we forget that non-designers don't see the world the way we do. My wife has perfected the eye roll she uses whenever I start talking design about something I see. Sometimes she'll feign interest, but I know that she doesn't care that the line spacing on the restaurant's menu is too tight. She just doesn't get it because she's not a designer. But neither are our clients. That's why they hire us for their projects. And sometimes, it's easy to forget that they don't have the same knowledge as us, nor the same interests. And they view the world through a different set of lenses than we do. That's why it's a good idea that before you say or present anything to a client, you try to consider it from their point of view. Case in point. A designer shared an intro packet PDF in a design group I belong to, asking for advice. The PDF is to give prospective website clients to explain what a CMS is, a Content Management System. She went into great detail, outlining everything there is to know about CMSs. I how thorough she was. However, I and several others pointed out that it wasn't suitable for clients. She explained how databases work, with columns and rows and entry IDs. and how you can edit a database directly with tools such as phpMyAdmin. Then she explained how she builds a custom portal for each client that allows them to easily add, delete, and edit posts in the database. And finally, she explained how the items in the database end up displaying on the web page. She even showed examples of the PHP code required to make it all happen. Nothing was wrong with anything she presented, except that most of them are redundant to clients. A client doesn't need to know how databases work or how the info from the database ends up on a web page. All the client needs to know is their website will have a CMS with an easy-to-use interface allowing them to add, delete and edit the content of their site. Remember, these are perspective clients. Meaning they haven't committed to working with you yet. You don't want to scare them away before they've had a chance to work with you. Donald Miller, the author of Building a StoryBrand, said it best. “If you confuse, you'll lose.” Consider your marketing message from a design client's perspective. Let's say you specialize in logo design, and you showcase your three-step process on your website. Step 1) I start with a meeting. I have a list of over 50 questions I ask you, covering everything from how your company got started, to your mission, to where you see the future going. This allows me to get to know you and your business. Step 2) I take the answers you gave me and start the research process. I take a close look at what your immediate competition is doing. I examine your industry as a whole to determine if there are any trends we may want to follow. I may conduct focus groups to learn more about what your clients think of you. I then gather all this information and begin the concept stage, where I brainstorm and develop several different ideas. I then narrow it down to the most promising ones and fine-tune them until I'm satisfied. Step 3) I present you with the best ideas. If required, we then enter the revision process, where you are allowed three sets of revisions to tweak your logo until you are satisfied. Once done, I'll create a brand guide that outlines the rules for using your new logo and supply everything you'll need in various file formats. This shows a comprehensive process. And a designer may think this is perfect for showing the client why they're worth the price they're charging. However, it may have an adverse effect from a client's point of view. "50 questions? I just want a logo for my new business. Why does it have to be so complicated? Maybe I should find another designer." Imagine a client's perspective if they saw this on your website. Here is my three-step process. Step 1) I take the time to get to know you and your business. Step 2) This is where the magic happens as I develop the perfect logo for your business. Step 3) I present you with the best concepts for you to choose from. Don't worry. You'll be allowed to suggest minor adjustments to tweak the logo until you're 100$ satisfied. Now, this a client can understand. All the other information is redundant or can be relayed once the person becomes an actual client. Presentation and mockups. If you are not using mockups in your presentation, you are doing yourself and your clients a disservice. I can tell you from experience that mockups make a massive difference in a client's decision-making process. Many clients are not visual thinkers like designers are. Their creativity isn't honed like ours to imagine how things will look in different situations. A logo presented on a white background doesn't have the same effect as a logo shown on a storefront, a shirt or a vehicle. A tri-fold brochure displayed flat may look good. But it doesn't have the same oomph as a mockup showing what it looks like when partially folded. I've had several clients over the years tell me they were hesitant about a logo design I presented until they saw the mockups. Once they saw the logo “in action,” they saw its full potential. That's because clients often can't picture it on their own. Asking them to imagine the logo on the side of a delivery van is nowhere near the same as showing them the logo on a delivery van. When you prepare your presentations, thinking like a client can help you close more deals. Showing confidence, a client's perspective. You know the way you can sometimes tell when a person isn't sure of themself. It's offputting. Try to think about how you come across when dealing with clients. From the client's point of view, do you show confidence? Think about it. As you're pitching yourself to a potential client, They're looking at you and considering whether or not you're someone they want to work with. And that decision may have nothing to do with your actual pitch. From the client's point of view, they want to see someone who shows confidence in themself and their ability to do the work. You want every encounter with a potential client to end with the prospect thinking, “This is someone I want to work with.” Let's talk pricing from a client's perspective. Once again, thinking from a client's point of view. Are your prices too high or too low? Is a client willing to invest in you? There's no right or wrong answer regarding how you price yourself. It comes down to the type of client you want to work with. Think of it this way. Let's say you're in the mood to go out for a steak dinner. You can find a restaurant that serves a $20 steak. Or, you can go somewhere else and get a $200 steak. What's the difference? The difference is how much you're willing to spend on a steak. People who opt for the $20 steak might never consider spending $200 for a similar meal. However, some people regularly go out for $200 steaks and would never consider a $20 cut of meat. Now for all we know, both steaks came from the same cow. But that's beside the point. The person who opts to spend $20 on a steak and the person who opts to pay $200 have two different mindsets. Neither is right or wrong in their decision. It's just the way they are. The same thing applies to design clients. Thinking again from their perspective. Most clients who consider Fiverr a good place to get designs made would probably never consider paying thousands of dollars for a freelancer. And there are just as many clients who are willing to spend thousands of dollars which would never consider ordering from a cheap designer. So who are you marketing to? Do you want low-paying clients to say you're their person? Or do you want high-paying clients to think you're the perfect designer for them? Figure that out, and then target yourself to go after that group of clients. In this case, thinking like a client can help you land the clients you want. I could go on and on about how thinking like a client can benefit you. But I think you get the idea. Most clients are not designers. They don't think like designers, nor do they see the world around us the same way designers do. Don't let that become a gap between you and them. Before everything you do, ask yourself, “How would a client experience this?” And if you're successful at doing this. There's no reason why your design business shouldn't be successful either.

"Site owners shouldn't be doing performance for the sake of performance but for their own success on the web." —Thierry MullerIn this episode of Post Status Excerpt, David decides it's a good time to check in on the newly formed WordPress Performance Team with Felix Arntz and Thierry Muller. They talk about the things the Performance Team targeted first (and why), backward compatibility, and what other CMSs (beyond WordPress) do a good job with performance. Find out how all of us in the WordPress community can support the performance team.Why This is Important: Performance is an often-discussed topic when it comes to WordPress. The diversity of the plugin ecosystem brings unique performance challenges with it. WordPress core itself needs to remain competitive, if not lead, in performance. Every week Post Status Excerpt will brief you on important WordPress news — in about 25 minutes or less! Learn what's new in WordPress in a flash. ⚡You can listen to past episodes of The Excerpt, browse all our podcasts, and don't forget to subscribe on Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, iTunes, Castro, YouTube, Stitcher, Player.fm, Pocket Casts, Simplecast, or by RSS.

I typically open up my monologue with setting some tension or to attempt to provoke how a grand idea might come together in the upcoming audio. I don't have that today. What I have is a young entrepreneur that impressed me with his story, branding, and how he's approaching the business of…college movers. I know you normally tune in for the SaaS powered wins or the WordPress unicorns, but trust me when I tell you, Sam Chason, founder of Storage Scholars, is bringing the heat. I'll admit, his story was so good, that I almost didn't believe him. I fully expected to decline the interview headed into our pre-interview. Luckily that wasn't the case, and now I'll be rooting for him from the sidelines hoping he can turn this business into a massive success. By the way, we do talk WordPress/WooCommerce and the platforms he's tried in the past — we're still getting our hands dirty here. If you enjoy the episode and want to buy me a virtual coffee in support, go to buymeacofee.com/mattreport and show your support for the show. Episode transcript [00:00:00] Sam: Storage scholars is a door to door, white glove service for college students. So basically the way that the service works it's generally for out-of-state or international studies.[00:00:09] I was from New York. I went to a school called wake forest, North Carolina, and I had two international hallmates, one from China, one from Ethiopia, and I would stereotypically see them bring over two large suitcases overseas. They'd bought the rest of the stuff that they needed at target bed bath and beyond, et cetera.[00:00:24] And there was just no way they were going to ship back their bedding or school supplies back to China. Right. So I thought, had to be a better way type deal. So the way the service works now is students receive boxes and packing supplies that we prefer finalists. They packed up their stuff. They snap a couple photos of the items.[00:00:39] They're looking at store add any extra insurance, lock up their room and go home. And then we generally have contracts with these universities. We get key access from the dorms. We use students on those campuses to do a contact us, move out about a 24 to 72 hours after campus closes, store it for the summer, however long they need to store it for and then have it ready and waiting in their new room pre delivered when they arrived back on campus.[00:01:01] So that's some storage scholars in a nutshell.[00:01:03] Matt: Yeah. When I first, before. You and I chatted. I was like, okay, moving. Like I say, moving company. And in my, in my head, I'm like, big industry makes sense. But then when we chatted and you're like, yeah, but people don't need to bring all their stuff back.[00:01:17] They're gone for whatever a month, 45 days, a half semester or whatever the thing is. Ship, all this stuff back. And I was like, wow, this is really interesting. You mentioned that there were some competitors out there kind of doing this same thing, but just kind of half asking it. Right. It was just a little bit of, one thing, a little bit of the other, not the full, the full compliment.[00:01:38] What are you doing better than the[00:01:39] Sam: current. Well, yeah, definitely shout out Nick hubris, sweaty start up. He was one of the first people I met doing this up at Cornell and that's kinda how I ended up on Twitter and probably my view as well. He, he sold a similar business up in the Northeast, so we were more so in the Southeast, we actually just recently signed a contract with a school in Pennsylvania a couple of days ago.[00:01:56] So making an expansion there watch out during removers, but a lot of it has to do with not only the university partnerships. So we're doing everything by the school's books. There's some others kind of, Companies out there that will just farm emails blast to a school and just figure they can get 30, 40, 50 customers per school and say that they operate at 80 a hundred institutions across the country.[00:02:16] We're more about building deep in Beth's in-depth relationships with those schools. And not only with the administration, but then also. Really fostering entrepreneurship on these campuses and kind of in two to three students, generally sophomores, they have some long longevity and bring these kids on board.[00:02:31] Having them shadow us, they can learn really important, like marketing operations, entrepreneurial type skills in school and ideally pay the wafers their way through college, kind of the same way that I[00:02:40] Matt: did. Yeah. So it's like, it's I don't, these are my words. You tell me paid internship. Is that how it.[00:02:47] Sam: That's funny. You say that that's actually quote unquote what I just put on our handshake profile. Some of these schools, cause it was not getting accepted before as more of like a high paying job. I figured not only is that what's more appealing to a college student nowadays. They want something for their resume, but also something they can make money on it, but it's also kind of the way we were able to get it out of these universities and getting on those job boards in the shop postings.[00:03:07] But, but it's very valid to,[00:03:08] Matt: so to my dedicated audience, so. Of what Sam just said is probably clicking to you. Why? Sam is here generally, I'm interviewing somebody who has a digital product, a digital service and agency software as a service. We're going to get to that in a moment, but I really love the, because again, people who listen to this know that I'm a huge proponent of entrepreneurship, but learning the nuts and bolts of it, rolling up the sleeves and getting to work.[00:03:33] It's a fantastic model. So I applaud you for like having this platform for people to. Really figure things out. I don't want to say the hard way, but like, you're getting them a job. They're learning all of this stuff. Have you been able to measure that? I know it's kind of early days for you, but how have you measured the success of people actually learning the business side of things, even if they're not sticking with you, for years as their end, is there anything like that, that you have a feedback loop?[00:03:59] Sam: Yeah. I mean myself. I The reason why I started this business was to pay my way through school. I did it more out of necessity. But my business partner, actually, he was a year younger than me. He's across the room over here. He's probably got his headphones in, but he was a biochemistry major coming to school, like 4.0 student, like probably could have gone to Stanford med.[00:04:16] But really got the itch, got the bug working with. And decided about halfway through his junior year to tell his whole family, Hey, I'm putting my medical career on hold. I really want to actually make, not necessarily to make a difference, be able to actually do things with my, with do things with my time, like immediately, as opposed to going to medical school residency and not be able to actually have a career until 10, 12 years after school.[00:04:36] So he was probably like the first one. And then. As we went out and started hiring these co-founders, I'm going to had kids that were sophomores, juniors, seniors, and they graduated and they all wanted to had three of them wanted to then work full-time afterwards. We ended up doing that. He ended up running like a residential, commercial moving company that we had for a little while.[00:04:52] Other ones have then worked for a little bit and then gone out and worked for companies like at JP Morgan. And truly, I think the biggest thing about this is a lot of times people will have things on the resume. And, but they don't necessarily have the ability to talk about it. Like, Hey, I worked at, I intern at UI Parthenon.[00:05:07] That's been amazing, but like, what did you actually do at Eli Parthenon? Right. And when they work at storage scholars, they have such a breadth of actually what they did. They went from they're calling the customers. They're actually meeting the customers. They're executing tons of marketing strategies are actually learning sales experience directly from us.[00:05:25] Full-scale entrepreneurship and we're taking all the tools that we've had found successful on campuses in the past, give them that playbook, but then also giving them pretty much unlimited budget to then do whatever they feel is best on their campus. And they feel really empowered. That's really where we found most of our success.[00:05:40] Matt: That's awesome stuff. A listener. You might hear some noise in the background. Sam is sitting in his common area of his apartment building, but I'm happy to report if you're watching the show on, on YouTube, YouTube, youtube.com/uh, the Matt report. Sam has a professional microphone in front of him. Thanks to thanks to me, urging him to get one, because he'll be doing a round of podcasts and you'll realize how good it is for his business and the marketing side.[00:06:02] In our pre-interview you mentioned Excel. I want to talk about the software side of it, and then we'll talk about more of like that marketing and branding stuff. Cause I think your, your branding's on point and I want to learn a little bit more. How you got to that point, why you realize that's important, but in our pre-interview you mentioned that your brother helped build some of the software.[00:06:21] Of the business. A lot of my listeners are into that and to the software side, how they're making things click. Is there a certain tech stack that you can talk about that you're using to build the inner inner workings of the business or even the public facing one? Are you using WordPress for the website?[00:06:38] Sam: Stuff like that? I guess I'll start with the part that I'm more knowledgeable, but the front end was at one point it was WooCommerce when it first, first. Went to Squarespace. And then actually I'm probably about 80% done with migrating over to a web flow. Sorry, escaped my mind for a second. So the,[00:06:58] Matt: that you for leaving woo commerce.[00:07:00] And then, then now you're kind of, okay, he's going back to Webflow. So at least it's something that's.[00:07:04] Sam: Yeah, so more so from the aesthetic design aspect, we go into web flow mean not, we were kind of reaching our capabilities a lot more of like block tacks and block images on Squarespace. And I just wasn't able to kind of take it where I want it to go in terms of the branding.[00:07:17] But then the backend is, has gone through. A ton of different iterations. A lot of it had to do with, we had one business model and then you get key access from the universities. You go to a different business model, then you have COVID and you have to start doing like shipping packages. And my five brothers listened to this.[00:07:33] He definitely was a little frustrated. His, his, his answer was always, yes. Yes, we could do that, but w I don't think we really understood exactly what yes, Matt and all the work that went into that. And we have, I think 287 custom fields for each associated account for different like yes-no formulas and stuff like that, too.[00:07:50] But it's, it's basically built mostly on PHP angler a and my SQL eight in terms of the, kind of the front end of the database, and then AWS as well. So we're actually, he's stepping in. He's coming more of like a CTO role. And we're bringing in kind of like a development team. So we have two full-time developers, as well as somebody who's kind of managing them as well.[00:08:10] And they should be coming on board in the next couple of weeks. It will be the real test of all the feedback we've gotten is that he has really clean code. And I really hope that to be true, but[00:08:18] Matt: if not, why not? Brother's not getting anything for Christmas. Coming[00:08:21] Sam: now. He's, he's, he's an incredible mind.[00:08:23] So I would assume all of that stuff is.[00:08:25] Matt: I, I want to talk about this software segment for a little bit here. When you left WooCommerce, what were your reasons? You're not in an uncommon, a lot of people listening to this too. There's a segment who are agency owners, freelancers. They talked a lot of folks who hop through different CMSs.[00:08:40] They hear a bunch of different things. You're not in an uncommon seat to be making these jokes. But what was it for you to leave WooCommerce to begin with?[00:08:47] Sam: Yeah, you have to appreciate that. I was 18 and I was better than my first ever website. And I just had my brother at the time because he was the only like technical person.[00:08:54] I knew, Hey, like what should we build the website on? He kind of helped me build the WooCommerce website to begin with. And then I had a friend that was working for kind of a different startup. It was more, it was a food and Bev startups with a little more of a prettier interface. He's like, you gotta use Squarespace.[00:09:07] You gotta start using canvas. This is mind blowing to me like, oh, I can actually just drag and drop and make this as opposed to relying on my brother to actually go in and design something where he was extremely technically sound. But aesthetically is probably is more of a secondary. So that was more so just the ability for me to do it myself.[00:09:23] But I'm sure now, five, six years later will commerce would, it would have been more of a drag and drop. It just was a little more intimidating at the time. Yeah, for[00:09:30] Matt: sure. For sure. Is the software side without revealing the secret sauce. Is that a secret sauce for you over your competition?[00:09:39] Like what technologies or how do you simplify this experience for your customers through the avenue of.[00:09:47] Sam: A hundred percent. It's definitely, there's no reason to fully reinvent the wheel. Storage and moving companies existed obviously for decades, what we do. It's, you can't buy some off the shelf software.[00:09:58] That's actually going to work for exactly what you're looking for. So we've definitely, scoured the competition. We've built our own software and then we've also kind of taken probably some of the 10, five, 10% from these other. Worked for them. And put it into our platform. Of course they can kind of like a, a Frank and business of, of storage scholars for the college Jordan's game.[00:10:17] But I think a couple of the things are you market to the college students, but the real customers are kind of the parents. So that was the biggest lesson we learned in terms of making accounts that can give both parent and student access where the student come on, they can make the account, the parent that doesn't have to like contact the student to find out their log.[00:10:34] The parent can pay. The student can edit the pick-up drop-off information. It's a whole open flow of information that in the past it would be that scenario would be that Jane Smith is a divorced mom and she made an account for her son Johnny Maxwell and. The account would say Jane Smith, but it's actually for the sun and it's like, what is going on?[00:10:54] Right. So being able to really be flawless in the flow of information and then that way we actually know exactly who we're communicating to, and we can also communicate both to the students and parents and keep everybody in the loop is it's probably the biggest differentiator.[00:11:05] Matt: Is this all website on the website or is there a mobile.[00:11:08] That everybody has instant access to.[00:11:11] Sam: Yeah, it's a mobily optimized website right now. That's actually where we're stepping into as well as making an app. I think the initial instinct was why do we need an app who wants to download a storage app and have it on their phone at all times? But at the same time, there is definitely limitations with websites and being able to upload images quickly.[00:11:27] And just more so the speed of the site is what's holding us back right now from not necessarily a customer standpoint, that's a lot simpler, but more of a managerial standpoint because customer they're uploading. Five images, total where the managers are going in, potentially looking at 600 orders in a one or two day period and just the load speed and the page speed needs to be increased.[00:11:44] So making a oh an app first for the managers where they can also integrate all the software, use it right now, like off the shelf in terms of time tracking payroll and also integrating our actual software altogether to have one harmonious unit.[00:11:58] Matt: What challenges are you finding? Kind of like you're almost in that marketplace.[00:12:04] Conundrum where you need to kind of serve two different crowds, right? So in a, in a marketplace standpoint, you need the customers to show up and you need the inventory to sell them in your case, you need the customers to show up, but you also you're like, so you're building a software for these customers to snap the photos of the stuff.[00:12:21] People need to pack up and move for them. But then you're also trying to build software for your team to use, efficiently and effectively. How is that process? Like, you get customers that give you feedback. Hey, this experience was great. This experience sucked. And then you get the same feedback from your, from your employees.[00:12:35] Or like, I can't find the stuff fast enough, or I can't see all the orders coming in. Has that been a challenge at all or fairly smooth sailing so[00:12:43] Sam: far? Yeah, definitely. Always been customer first. I think the customer experience has not been sacrificed by any means, but it's been the iterations of the business.[00:12:53] So like right now, About 80% or sorry to say it's about 50, 50, I would say at this point, because we keep changing of our business is key access schools, kids leave their stuff in their room. They go home. We do big mass move-outs in 24, 48 hours. That has, Boriso been put on the back burner because we have a little more time and autonomy.[00:13:13] We're not dealing directly with the students. Face-to-face where we can kind of sit back and wait for the website to load or just kind of go on your computer. Make that work, but then you have an entirely different way. We built it where it's like a by appointment where you meet the customers at the door, they pick up time, they're on a alive queue and then there's worklist associated with that.[00:13:30] So the by appointment has been perfected, but then now that we continue to evolve and make the business model better, it's like actually having them make two different work lists, one for like a one day, move out and one for like a 10 day move out. And with, with all the things that have obviously happened in the last 12 months, we had to.[00:13:46] Make some other things become priority, but I think, I don't think, this year is exactly what we're doing. We're actually going to make that. So they're both working and you can have a work list. You can download that. You can search by it. You can filter by dorm. You can filter by floor of the dorm, and then you're just going through and just crushing dorm by dorm, as opposed to like looking at specific dates or people are signing up for their move-outs.[00:14:05] I want to[00:14:05] Matt: move on to talk about the challenges of running the business. Aside from the software and talk about these logistic things, part of the advantage. I remember you telling me and you, I think you mentioned it before in the pre-interview is that you do go into the room, right? They, you get access to the room to grab the.[00:14:21] And your competition doesn't do that, right?[00:14:25] Sam: Yeah. So, some. Some of these schools have access to the dorms. But the thing is, is that a lot of them are, are basically more so high level marketing companies. And then they're farming out the actual, moving to local moving companies and with what's going on with COVID and stuff as well, in terms of like having, being coming vaccinated, that's one big barrier to entry at like, well, how are you going to trust us outside moving company to walk into your dorms, but who can you trust?[00:14:49] The students on your campus because they've been vaccinated. So that was kind of one way for us to get a backdoor approach to that. And then on top of that too, if you're an 18 year old girl and your father is sending you to school, does your father really want you to have, 40 old man walking into your room stereotypically, right.[00:15:03] And walking into that dorm and picking up your stuff and moving it out when you could have a kid that was in your calculus class. And we definitely do struggle with the kind of balancing that image of peer to peer, but also. Kind of perfection and, level of quality because some people are like, this is awesome.[00:15:18] You're my, your. Current, classmate at the same time, my mom doesn't mind if I can trust you with my stuff. So that's another reason kind of behind the branding and trying to make us see them a more of like the Uber black premier service. We're not a discount service, we're charging a premium price and, our level of service should be reflected in that just because we're using students, that doesn't necessarily decrease the quality.[00:15:37] It's just increasing the personalization. Yeah.[00:15:40] Matt: And, but the particular challenge getting to was is you have to make these, not only do you have to make that I guess, sale or relationship to the customer, but you also have to make it with the school because it's not like the school is just going to let you do all this stuff without, I'm assume without them knowing who the heck you are and like what's going on.[00:15:56] They start seeing all these black t-shirts rolling in the nice logos on it. Like what's happening here. I'm sure you have to try. Again, like a couple sides of the fence that the end user customer, and then the place that has the inventory, which is the school and in it, you have to build up those relationships on both sides.[00:16:14] The, and then the next challenge, which popped into my head when we were chatting earlier is just the, student, what I'll say is a paid internship. These student body employees, if you will, across the country how are you managing. Scaling that like, do you have to start having regional managers, people, once they do graduate school, they become an actual full season employee with you.[00:16:38] And now they're managers of that school. How does that ramp[00:16:41] Sam: up? Yeah. So we call those internships. We call them campus co-founders because we truly believe that they are kind of co-founding in some ways like franchising their campus, and they can either get an inflated hourly upwards, 15 to $20 an hour at a base, or they can essentially get like a percentage of revenue.[00:16:57] And then of course, they're going to see that increase the more years that they're actually operating. So when you have, like, for example, you had a kid who, a soft. Junior senior. By the time he was senior year, he made $20,000 in a single move out based on that revenue schedule. And then he wanted to continue working full time.[00:17:14] So I think you have the people that are naturally interested. But the challenge with that of course is when we were kind of under a million dollars in sales or a couple years ago, it was all right. Well, we want to bring these people on, but the beauty of this business is seasonal. And as a full-time student, it was.[00:17:28] But like now that we're graduating we're no longer in school. We have all this extra time and like, to what you alluded to, we're spending a lot more of that time actually selling universities and kind of university sales, as opposed to just, building up this marketing and then trying to do the move out and then do the move in and.[00:17:42] Taking a rest because we actually have school to do it. It's finding a job to do the rest of the year. So as we've been able to grow, I think the beauty of this is that the more people that have actually wanted to work full-time we've been able to give them full-time opportunities. So we heard a gift from Milan.[00:17:55] We hired a kid actually just from college of Charleston a couple of weeks ago. He came on full time and then we have two more in the pipeline, one from Richmond and one from Washington and Lee university that are currently seniors in. There if express interests and, and working post-graduation I think for the first time, I'm really excited that we actually will be able to give them full-time opportunities as just like you said, as regional managers and one region managing their region physically, but then also helping to then manage remote.[00:18:20] No another five or 10 that are schools under their domain.[00:18:23] Matt: Do you look at certain areas? So I'm south of Boston, there's a billion schools here. Like, do you look at areas that you want to go into that maybe you haven't found any organic interest from? Is that a thing? Or is it like, Hey, I'm just like this natural growth just works and it's way easier to manage or do you look at territories that you want to get into and, and how does.[00:18:44] Sam: A hundred percent. So I went to school in North Carolina, so natural expansion was Virginia, South Carolina. Saw a competitor that had a school in Texas at SMU. So that's how we went down to Texas rice and that's to me this past year, I just moved down to Texas to expand that. Texas and Florida. But I'm from New York, my business partners from Boston too.[00:19:01] So we definitely have our sights set on the Northeast. There's just actually a little more competition up there. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Mean being a fast follower is definitely a lot easier than trying to educate not only the school, but the customer on what a valet storage service is.[00:19:16] So I'd rather just go in where they've had a previous, service provider that's just bad. And then we can just go in and take over. But where are we? Found kind of those pockets is actually we started going to housing conferences. So conferences that have the residency, I, the operations people.[00:19:31] And that's actually where he met this one person from Pennsylvania, where by no means were we meaning to expand there. But we developed a great rapport. She loved what she heard and she was like, yeah, I'd love to sign an exclusive contract with y'all. That'll happen in the last couple of weeks, but now it's like, oh, well now that puts some eyes in Pennsylvania.[00:19:47] Maybe we need to expand there a little quicker and. Pennsylvania's got probably 20 schools that we could expand to. And once you have that kind of density, there's no reason not. Yeah.[00:19:55] Matt: I'd imagine and correct me if I'm wrong. Like I, I would imagine when you go into expand into a new territory, your biggest or potentially your biggest spend is going to be marketing and advertising.[00:20:05] Just to get the word out there. It's not like you're having to ship a bunch of product or these amazing boxes that we're going to talk about in a second. But is there any kind of like thing you have to ship in? And store your own storage stuff, something really meta, like, is there a thing you have to ship out there?[00:20:20] A box of stuff and people just have to.[00:20:23] Sam: Yeah. So yeah, I'll ship a box or two of our storage scholars boxes to the co-founders tell them to go out and buy a table, give them their corporate credit card to go do that. And that's going to have shirts, cups, stickers, banners, film backs, kind of that, that kind of marketing material.[00:20:37] But the beauty too, is that on any first year campus, whether we're talking about marketing materials or whether we're talking about. Storing kids' actual things is that, there's a really nice thing called self storage. That's usually five minutes from campus. So when we're not necessarily sure about a market, the numbers can look great, but it doesn't assign me.[00:20:54] People are going to use the service. So we'll use self storage almost exclusively for the first year. And then once you have that market proven, then you're going to go out and you're going to find an industrial warehouse lease. But that being said, it's also another challenge of the business because we might have.[00:21:06] 10 15,000 square feet from the four months of made August. But then all these kids move back in. You might have a couple of students that store longer. You might have some marketing materials, some extra boxes, but that's going to come down to a maximum, thousand square feet. Right. So then you're kind of downsizing either to self storage or coming up with a really creative lease with the landlord.[00:21:22] But that's a, that's definitely a, a tough aspect of the business too. It's finding that space.[00:21:27] Matt: Oh, when you raise a billion dollars, I hope it's not one of those. We work stories where you set out to be a coworking space, but you ended up being a real estate company. And then why the hell do you own all this property?[00:21:36] And you're like, oh, we're really a moving company. And then sheets are all imbalanced. Let's talk about, let's talk about marketing for a second. Toward the end of the show, a great marketing. I think I know the answer, but why did you focus on, how did you feel? How did you know that, that marketing's really going to work for something like this or branding and your logo and stuff is really going to work for something like this?[00:21:57] A competitive market.[00:21:59] Sam: Yeah, the way the business was started, as I printed out some flyers that I'd probably throw up out. If I looked at today, I'm there pretty embarrassing, but I went door to door. I saw all my freshmen, hallmates and freshman classmates, and they knock on the door and they say, come in.[00:22:13] I'm like, no, that's, I would knock on the door again to come in. And I'm like, no, I'm not who you think I am, but sure. I'll come in. So I, I definitely had some tough conversations at the beginning and got some raw feedback on what was what they were looking for and what they weren't looking for. But I think initially too, in terms of like a branding aspect after kind of doing that customer discovery was.[00:22:31] The best advice that I got from one of my entrepreneurship professors is there was a competitor on campus and I was like, oh, they're charging $14 a box. I'm going to charge 13. Oh, he's like, do not be the discount service, like always charge more and, but provide more too. Right. So I from, I wouldn't say day one, but from day two, it's like, okay.[00:22:49] Yes, we need to be out there. Be the premium service and service, the top level customer and give them the service that they, that they desire. And the whole black and white was really trying to be the. Premium futuristic, Uber black type experience, luxury experiences, as opposed to being, I don't know, like a green eco-friendly moving company.[00:23:07] We are. Absolutely. You can find that. I don't mean to say it like that, but I think sometimes there's, there's definitely certain colors that elicit certain emotions and I, I want it to be more of a sleek elite luxury brand.[00:23:17] Matt: Yeah. The do do when every time you're moving students, You always rocking the branded boxes or is it like one branded box on top and the rest of them are[00:23:26] Sam: brown?[00:23:27] No, absolutely. So not only does that give you the brand awareness, but actually, so we used to use obviously brown boxes, right. And we would buy these stickers and they put the sticker on top of the box. It also put the sticker on there, out of box item, their TV, their refrigerator, whatever. But in terms of like an inventory perspective, if you imagine you have a box and then you'd stack another box on top, And you have a sticker on the top.[00:23:49] Well, you can't see it. Right? So those boxes were also designed because you have their writing, their name, the order number, the item number on the top of the box. They're also writing it massively on the side of the box, actually in the storage facilities. They're lined up. Yeah. I see all their names very, very clearly.[00:24:04] So from just like an identification standpoint, that was the purpose of it. And then of course, yet when you walk around with black storage, collar shirts, white shirts, white shorts, and these big black boxes, and then you see them in the, in the dumpsters for two weeks after, and the recycling bins, after everyone leaves and comes back, it's like, it's great branding.[00:24:19] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. People wonder what the heck's going on. I want that, like, that looks easy. Speaking of looks easy. I'm looking at the. Archive a web archive.org site. And I'm looking back to August, 2018. Your tagline for the site back then was easy, effortless and economical live the scholars. How did you change that from a marketing perspective?[00:24:40] You started talking to customers, you chatted with them. They were like, no, we'll pay you a little bit more money. And you got rid of the word economical. How did that all play out? Changing that.[00:24:48] Sam: Yeah. I thought alliteration was more powerful than value at the time. So that's probably why I went with that.[00:24:53] But yeah, I it was, like I said, I, I want it to beat out the competition because also at the same time, I didn't, I wasn't confident. Like I knew it was confident in myself, but I'd never, I didn't want to over promise and under deliver. So to say, Hey, we're the best service we're better than the competition.[00:25:06] I'd never even moved to box before. It's like, that was kind of tough. So that was year one. And then once we, server. 64 students at wake forest university. I was like, all right, well, this went well. We made it happen. I touched every single box. I know exactly how this works. I shook probably half the kids hands and the parents hands that use this service.[00:25:22] All right. Now I'm confident we can go out there and start to spread what we're doing and do it in a, in a much better way and be able to charge that premium price tag, Sam,[00:25:30] Matt: this doesn't sound like it's your first rodeo. Who do you have? Have you ran a business before somebody, your dad, your parents, a great mentors.[00:25:38] You're just born with it. What is it?[00:25:40] Sam: So my parents are both public high school teachers in New York. I'm the youngest of three. My brother is a web developer, my sister's a and in fashion. So I, I didn't necessarily get it from them fully, but definitely the fiscal responsibility absolutely came from my parents, actually my grandfather mostly, and from, at a young age.[00:26:00] Kind of the quintessential story would be, and maybe two of them was that at five. I was like, Hey mom, dad, like, I want to have a lemonade stand. So great. Okay. So you're going to go out. You're going to buy the paper, the markers, the plastic cups and the, lemonade powder. And w we'll we'll lend you the money in the beginning, but you got to pass that back.[00:26:17] And to like be, $18 in debt at five years old, it's like, shit. Like I gotta make this happen. Right. So I'm standing out in the street and I'm flagging people down. And, and from that point on, even at age nine, I'm like, oh mom, like Frankie wants an Xbox for Christmas. Okay. Well, how are you going to get that for him?[00:26:33] Right. Well, it's like, I wasn't poor, but it just kind of given him. The fiscal responsibility at such a young age, what kind of drove me to, to start develop these skills very early on and start flipping ATVs cars and stuff like that in high school and selling candy out of my locker and middle school. I was always kind of hustling.[00:26:49] Matt: Are you, have you raised money? I don't think we, as we talked about this in the pre-interview raising money, organic bootstrap, I should say, or do you plan on raising money? What are the cards hold.[00:26:58] Sam: Yeah. Currently exclusively bootstrapped. Like I said, too excited for aside from a little PPP, but it, the, the business motto is structured such as, and the reason why I started this business was, Hey, I need to make money.[00:27:10] Like today. I need to pay for my school today. So how can I do that? And so kids would pay a $50 deposit, which they still do now. And that for me covered the initial cost of the boxes, the tape, the storage units, the trucks, and that's, what's been able to catapult. As far, I don't think we could grow to 150 schools next year without raising money, but that's not really the purpose or really the path right now.[00:27:33] Like I said, building deep in-depth relationships with the universities and the life cycle of a, of a university sales cycle is, is pretty it's pretty. Oh, it's more of a relationship driven business. So trying to figure that out along the way, and at this point where we've been able to bootstrap it and keep it going that way.[00:27:49] Matt: Sam chase and storage scholars, storage, scholars.com, Sam, anywhere else you want folks to go?[00:27:56] Sam: Yeah, definitely follow us on socials on on Instagram, on Facebook, LinkedIn, we are definitely trying to be a young company. So give us some rod feedback. If, if you're in that age, demographic 18 to 21, let us know what we're doing.[00:28:10] Right. Let's know what we're doing wrong. Love to hear from you, ★ Support this podcast ★

Non-profits are constantly trying to solve the world's problems. They're always moving forward, never looking back. Yet, they can't seem to keep up with all of the updates WordPress and other CMSs make every day. In this episode, David will explore exactly why it's important for plugins and CMS updates to be tested by organizations that operate on a nonprofit budget. I'll also provide some tips on what to do if an update or add-on causes your website to break. Check out the show notes by visiting https://wowdigital.com/025

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