Too soon and too sad….
Oct 062011
Sep 292011
On the first day of the SCALA International Conference technical head honcho Peter Cherna rounded off the day’s main stage presentations with some details of upcoming software releases which I have posted below. Continue reading »
SCALA held their 11th annual conference near Amsterdam last week and the refrain repeated several times during the two days was that SCALA was probably the only signage software company who could have pulled this together. 300 delegates from around the world, 50 multilingual staff, 20 exhibition stands and a dozen journalists (including yours truly) made for a lively room and even livelier after-hours socialising.
The South American contingent had decided that Tequila was the perfect accompaniment to the previous nights festivities and the gruesome results were entirely predictable. Kids. just say no. After suitable prescription remedies Day Two kicked off with incoming CEO Tom Nix shaking off his obvious jet-lag and giving us a quick overview of how he sees things with an emphasis on the importance of mobile in the near future. He also formerly announced a new business intelligence product, presently in beta testing, which will enable the various disparate streams of real-time company data in large corporations to be consolidated and displayed on large -format screens in a suitable form. Much of what Tom said is also in our interview which will be posted shortly.
Next was a presentation on retail applications by SCALA’s newly-promoted and very smart Damon Crowhurst. Continue reading »
Sep 272011
There was almost a wicked anticipation on my part of the audience reaction to Adrian Cotterill’s keynote speech at the SCALA conference. The majority of the delegates and most of my press colleagues were unfamiliar with Adrian’s particular brand of journalism but I was pretty sure about what to expect. I was not to be disappointed. The quickly-gathering confusion was palpable in the room.
Adrian is the ‘editor in chief’ of the DailyDOOH, a popular stream of occasionally bitchy industry gossip from Adrian and some solid reporting from his underlings. As perhaps the most widely read journalist in the field (he thoughtfully provided a chart to suggest he was) you might expect Adrian to provide an overview of the market and an analysis of opportunities and pitfalls ahead.
SCALA held their 11th annual conference near Amsterdam last week and the refrain repeated several times during the two days was that SCALA was probably the only signage software company who could have pulled this together. 300 delegates from around the world, 50 multilingual staff, 20 exhibition stands and a dozen journalists (including yours truly) made for a lively room and even livelier after-hours socialising.
Gerard Bucas, the wily and ebullient South African who has led the company for nine years, wasted no time in his opening address in revealing the company’s best ever financial results and widest global reach. With 500,000 active screens SCALA is almost definitely the largest provider of digital signage software in the world and Gerard was bullish on the digital signage market’s near-term future and SCALA’s role in it. This was a sentiment repeated by several speakers during the event.
But Gerard also had a surprise in store for us..
Sep 012011
CATCH UP
Well the web-startup was put back by three months, one signage project is ongoing, the other fell by the wayside, and the software has changed tack somewhat but is still steaming ahead. The career-changer didn’t happen (shame) but Murdoch Junior is still in the sh*t (huzzah!).
I’m now the Associate Editor for the UK for gizmag.com one of the biggest emerging technology sites in the world (the view numbers are scary) and they actually pay me – in Kangaroo steaks and Fosters Lager. Give it a whirl – I shall be trying to pull in the occasional Digital Signage and Lighting & Sound story in there – I have the power. Continue reading »
Jul 182011
Rather than just let the post’s die off pathetically over the next few weeks I’ve decided to formerly shut down until 1st September. This is traditionally a quiet time of year newswise (unless you are Rupert Murdoch) and I have a number of projects that need putting to bed before then. I’m working on a piece of digital signage software (am I mad?!), two project proposals, a web startup and a potential career changer.
This is not goodbye but, au revoir.
See you in a little while.
Vince.
Jul 132011
A debate as old as the hills and a topic that still comes up at every client briefing. “Why are you quoting X for these displays when my 50″ TV cost Y?”. The reason is of course that professional signage displays are not at all like domestic TV’s even though they may superficially look the same. There’s a good post about it by an NEC sales manager over at Digital Signage News which you can find here.
Here are the main points for your next client education meeting. Continue reading »
Jul 122011
Great story from one of my favourite websites, SciFi newsblog IO9. South Koreans can order groceries from virtual shops in the subway and have them delivered before they get home. Continue reading »
Jul 112011
Combining two of last week’s subjects is a YouTube of UK company Touch 2 View‘s large touch screen installation plus the really rather slick live TV from Silverstream that ran throughout the Marketing Week multi-show at Olympia. This unit was also on show on the iTouch stand at Screenmedia a few weeks earlier. The USP of the iTab is that it’s essentially the iPad/iPhone emulator running on a MacMini connected to a very large touchscreen (on an NEC 82″ I think). This means you get the same smooth software operation as on a real iPad which, as yet, nobody seems to be able to compete with. It also means that customers are immediately familiar with the operation of the unit and are willing to dive straight in. Continue reading »
Jul 082011
The future of everything is ‘social’. We know because we are told by Mark Zuckerberg and he’s 12 years old and worth a trillion dollars. But what does that actually mean? It basically means that your customers will communicate quickly and en-masse amongst themselves to deliver a verdict on your products and services. It means that you better inject yourself into that conversation, honestly and respectfully, or ‘the mob’ just may burn your house down whether you deserve it or not. In many ways it’s a return to village life where everybody knows everybody else’s business – the Global Village has indeed come to pass. In business terms it’s no different for the world of Digital Signage – companies and commentators Tweet and Facebook and link-in and blog and comment and all the rest of it. But what does it mean for digital signage as a communication medium? That’s where it gets a bit tricky. Continue reading »
Jul 072011
Tired of waiting for Google and Apple to get their act together on TV applications? Well you can always join the Panasonic Viera developers program which is now allowing the great unwashed (that’s you and me) to join and submit applications for their Viera platform.
Now frankly nobody is likely to pay Panasonic much attention once the ‘great beasts’ get moving but it could be a great practice run. This is probably the future of digital signage people – get in now! Join up here.
Jul 072011
Requests For Proposal (RFP’s) are a big part of doing business with large and established companies or governmental bodies, They are called different things in different parts of the world but they’re basically a specification from a consultant plus a selection of pertinent technical and business questions that you are required to quote against to compete for a project. Continue reading »
Jul 062011
No, not a vertically-challenged robot but a development by Japanese company SKR technology.
Our company makes digital signage, and people were asking us to create a large screen device which has multi-touch functionality like a smartphone. We first tried to make it using Windows 7, but it didn’t meet the needs of our customers. They said they wanted crisp, fluid movement like in a smartphone but with a high resolution display. But when we asked touch panel and peripheral manupacturers they said they don’t support the Android OS, so we were temporarily stalled. We want to do a lot more work with Android in the future, so we decided to develop the system ourselves.
The full story, pics and video is here from the always-interesting DigInfo News.
Jul 052011
'Where are we again?'
In-Store in London last week was one section of a four-show exhibition extravaganza put on by Marketing Week mag. It’s always interesting to see shows outside of one’s normal existence and the tightly packed booths of marketing companies trying to sell ‘the magic’ to a 13.000 strong audience of predominantly female marketing executives was extraordinary. It’s all about the words and the amount of talking was epic – there were eight simultaneous presentation theatres on the go plus a large main theatre, an entirely separate paid conference, drop-in marketing advice centres and brand labs, and a constant live TV feed from the floor by Silverstream. One of my favourite stands allowed you to ogle real Ogilvy creatives creating. There was also a French Pavilion for some entirely logical reason I’m sure.
Blah Blah Blah
The relative sanity of the In-Store show itself revealed an eclectic mix of interior designers, shopfitters, graphics printers, POPAI people and quite a few digital signage vendors. MediaZest promoted a bunch of retail screen solutions including one of those glass back-projected talking mannequins, (the sound of which became old very quickly. Audio in signage is so problematic.).I had a strange conversation with Stratacache – it started when I asked whether the transparent screens on display were the Samsung 22″ and the LG 47″ recently shown in Japan. There were murmurings of dissent and mumbles about patent applications which I didn’t really catch before being dismissed. Odd. Continue reading »
Jul 042011
Kinetic have published their probably-self-serving-but-interesting-none-the-less, UK Digital DOOH Handbook for 2011 as a hardback and an ‘e-book’ – which is FREE. If you navigate from the Kinetic site to the e-book you get one of those utterly pointless and frustrating Flash book readers. Continue reading »
I’m a big fan of Stephen Randall, CEO of LocaModa. Stephen believes, as we all should, that 300 different content management systems in the relatively small DOOH playpen is a nonsense and an impediment to growth. Unlike most of us Stephen is a very clever serial entrepreneur and his company actually tries to do something about it by producing mobile/community software that will operate on top of any system, providing sponsors and advertisers a route to any screen without worrying about different system requirements. Continue reading »
Jun 292011
Off to the In-Store/Data Marketing/insight/Online Marketing multi-show tomorrow at London’s fabulous Olympia Grand Hall. There are a few DS alumni present plus some in-store ‘experience creators’ that utilise digital media. I’m quite looking forward to it. Dispatches will be sent unless I have been marketed to death. Will they have cake?
Jun 282011
Lowest common-denominator crapmeisters Amscreen have once again made my day. They have apparently signed an exclusive deal with Londis, a ubiquitous UK franchise chain of local/urban supermarkets. Now whilst buying my daily milk and toilet paper I will have the privilege of trying to avoid the visual pollution that is the disgusting black plastic Amscreen 17″ LCD plus always-broken LED scroller. My joy knows no bounds.
Jun 272011
You will be hearing a lot of talk about HTML5 in the context of Digital Signage over the next year or so. This is a short series of posts explaining what HTML5 is all about and why it is so relevant to our business.
Data Storage
In the olden days web browsing was a simple affair – you entered a URL and you were served a page from somewhere. You clicked on a link and were served another page. If that page didn’t exist or you lost your (dial-up) connection you got an HTTP 404 error message or … nothing. This was fine and dandy but servers had no idea whether you had visited them before and logging into sites with a password was a pain – you had to remember and type it every time. Early on in the history of the web therefore a form of minimal encrypted local storage was implemented to track your page visits. These are called Cookies are used extensively today in all sorts of ways. There are a few problems with them however – they are small, only up to 4K of text; They use a somewhat archaic security scheme and they are sent to the server from your machine every time you request the page they are associated with, whether required or not, this can mount up causing unnecessary traffic. Continue reading »