The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT This podcast is a bit different, as I am on the other side of the interview table - answering questions instead of asking them. That's because this is the last Sixteen:Nine podcast with me as the host. I've been doing Sixteen:Nine for almost 20 years, and the podcast version for the last nine. I'm retiring. I'm 67 and it is time to slow the hell down. I'm not leaving the industry, entirely. Just dialing back to a few side hustle gigs and other work, working more when the weather gets cold in my part of the world and I'm looking for distractions and extra money that will get Joy and I away from that cold weather for a bit. Think of this as my exit interview, done with my friends in Munich at invidis, who have been longtime content partners and will now edit and manage Sixteen:Nine. This makes me happy, as I didn't want to just stop what I think is a valued part of this business. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Balthasar Mayer: Welcome to the Sixteen:Nine podcast. This is Balthasar Mayer.  Antonia Hamberger: This is Antonia Hamberger.  Balthasar Mayer: We have a very special guest today. He is the bullshit filter of the digital signage industry. He's the head, heart, and driving force behind Sixteen:Nine, one of the rare people who manages to produce a trade publication that makes you laugh and gives you something to learn at the same time. He also keeps the digital signage industry with his beloved industry mixes at trade shows, and he's never afraid to cut through marketing fluff and speak his mind and now he's retiring, and we are very happy to have him here on the podcast. Welcome, Dave Haynes. Thank you.  Dave Haynes: Yes, I was joking. This is the exit interview. It's like leaving a company.  Antonia Hamberger: It is the exit interview, and we were thinking about just turning things around. Your blog is called Sixteen:Nine, and we're now doing the Nine:Sixteen edition. You'll get nine questions where we just let you ramble on a bit about your career, and then you'll get sixteen questions where you'll give us rapid-fire answers. Dave Haynes: Alright, I'm drinking Vice beer because I'm in Munich so this could get salty by the end of it.  Balthasar Mayer: That is our goal to make it salty, and interesting at the same time.  Antonia Hamberger: Dave, you've been doing this blog for 20 years. You've been in the industry for even longer than that. So I guess I'm wondering what made you go into digital signage? How did this happen in the first place?  Dave Haynes: I was in the newspaper industry. I was a daily newspaper reporter. I started in 1979 at the Winnipeg Free Press, and my first job out of school, working for a newspaper, was covering the rock music scene. So my first three years in the newspaper, I was interviewing rock bands like Billy Joel, Ozzy Osbourne, you name it, back in the early 80s, late 70s, just about anybody who was big at that time. I did an interview with them, which was quite interesting. At times, you would get lovely people and sometimes you'd get absolute a-holes, and everything in between.  Antonia Hamberger: Probably also a lot of drunk people, drunk rock stars?  Dave Haynes: Ozzy definitely was impaired, and Billy Joel, he stopped in Winnipeg on the first stop on his North American tour back in 1981 or something and he was just off a plane from New York, he and his band, and they had a press event at a Holiday Inn in Winnipeg, and he was very tipsy. He'd been having cocktails all the way from New York. So that was pretty interesting. I've had a number of those kinds of interviews.  So anyways, then I continued in newspapers for several years, became an editor, and got bored with being an editor in a market where not a lot of bad things happened, and as a journalist, you're not praying for bad things to happen, but they're much more interesting to write about than calm, stable situation. Whe

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Digichief has been helping digital signage and DOOH network operators feed the so-called content beast for a bunch of years. While the Kentucky-based company started up in 2007, its roots go back another decade to a tech start-up that did similar graphics-driven content work for broadcast TV. I've known co-founder Gene Hamm forever, but this podcast was the first time we had a detailed chat about what Digichief does and offers. We get into a bunch of things, including what's widely used and what seems like perfect contextual content, but hasn't caught on. We talk in detail, as well, about more customized content, and about a new service called Mercury that Digichief spent more than a year developing and recently rolled out. If you hear thumping sounds in the background on my end, that's the roofers. It wasn't until the morning we recorded this that I remembered about the racket they'd be making. Big job. Big bill. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Gene Hamm, thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know much about Digichief, could you gimme the elevator pitch on what you guys do?  Gene Hamm: Absolutely. Thanks Dave. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Am I the first one to say that?  Probably not, among the first.  Gene Hamm: My kids always say I've got a lot of dad jokes, so I oh, no, I won't bore with that. But thanks for having me today. I'm Gene Hamm, one of the founders of Digichief.  In a nutshell we're a content solutions provider. Basically, a one-source solution for all things content. We work in a number of capacities. We have a white labeled solution for data feeds for those clients who want to control the designs themselves. Or we can provide an integrated solution with HTML5, our widgets for clients that don't want to do the heavy lifting on the design. We already have it baked into our APIs, and so we've built up a library of content over the years. All the staples, weather news, sports info, that sort of thing. We also have some short-form, video series, and some other products that we work as distribution partners, with digital art, things like that. But in a nutshell, we aggregate, we curate, and we create content for you, and we provide it in a consistent manner. We take care of the licensing, and we keep up with the inevitable changes in the source, data feeds, and put it out in a highly scalable, cloud infrastructure. So I would say in the early days or earlier days of digital signage, a lot of companies, I shouldn't say a lot because there weren't many, and there still aren't that many, but the companies that were doing the sort of work that you do, I would describe as aggregators that they were collecting and harmonizing data feeds from news gathering organizations, government organizations like National Weather Service and so on, and getting in a format that's structured, reliable and all those sorts of things so that CMS companies or end users could tap into your feeds and have something that's reliable, organized, and curated to some degree. Is that a fair way of describing things?  Gene Hamm: That is a fair assessment, and I think it's evolved over time. I think early on, it was basically, just kind of an aggregation model. We actually started the company, it's an offshoot of another company we'd started back in the 90s where we worked in the broadcast television space, where we were doing lower third tickers, turnkey systems.  So kinda like Chiron?  Gene Hamm: Yeah, we were third-party developers for Chiron. So we worked a lot with Chiron early on, but a lot of the stuff you saw on the lower thirds and newscasts around the country was our stuff.  The dreaded tickers.  Gene Hamm: The dreaded tickers that kind of blew up in the 90s, yeah. We did news headlines, we were doing integrations with AP Weather. We actually ended up doing elections, school closings, and internet chat. We

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT If you go to big outdoor sports events, concerts in parks or even political rallies, there's a reasonable chance that what's happening is going to be relayed on a portable LED display that was wheeled into place by   trailer. My local footy team uses one and it is old and looks terrible. But that's not the norm, and certainly not for a Des Moines, Iowa company that is very specifically in the business of making and selling great-looking and bulletproof on-the-go LED trailers. Insane Impact has been at it for eight years and now has almost 500 units operating, mostly but not only in the United States. The flagship product is 17 feet wide by 10 feet tall, using 4mm LED and pushing as much as 7,500 nits. It's been designed to roll into place and be up and running in 10 minutes or less - even if a doofus like me was told to get it lit up. I had a really good chat with Tod Puetz, who started the company after first being a user, when he was in the golf equipment business. In this podcast, we get into a lot of things - including how he had the foresight to get ahead of the tariffs turmoil and pre-ordered enough electronics and hardware to hopefully ride out these uncertain months. We also talk about use-cases and probably the most curious application to date - drive-in funerals when COVID was raging. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Tod, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Insane Impact does, where you're based, those kinds of nuts and bolts questions?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, appreciate it Dave. Insane Impact, primarily focused on LED as a business, but we are an audio video integration company based out of Des Moines, Iowa.  Des Moines. So you're in flyover country? Tod Puetz: Absolutely.  It's actually very handy there because you're like two hours away from the East Coast and two hours away from the West coast, right?  Tod Puetz: It really is. Just in proximity here in the central part of the US, where our corporate office and warehouse location is about 65 seconds from the airport Des Moines International, so very easy to get in. All the major interstate throwaways between I-29 North and South and I-35 North and South, and then I-80 West. We're pretty much within minutes of getting anywhere we need to go east, west, north, or south.  Nice. How long has the company been around?  Tod Puetz: We started up in 2015, flipped the switch basically late December, 2015 and have been going rock and roll. So we're coming up on our 10 year anniversary here in December.  You are a founder?  Tod Puetz: I am, yeah. Founder and CEO.  So what compelled you to do this? What did you see in the marketplace that said, okay, this is what I should do?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, really the CliffNotes version, my former life was in the golf business. I was a manufacturer sales rep for TaylorMade Golf, and I was introduced to a gentleman here locally in Des Moines that had an older video truck and basically saw an opportunity to utilize that as a sales tool to help me sell more golf clubs.  So we took this video truck out on the driving range here locally in Des Moines, hooked it up to the launch monitor and, gosh, that was almost 18 years ago. Back then it was a big deal. Not a lot of people in your run of the mill average daily golfer really ever had an op opportunity to do that. They'd seen it on tour. But we brought the bigs out to the little team here in some of these country clubs, and again, larger than life. They were able to see their stats up on the screen and really fell in love with the technology back then, and were able to utilize that for a number of years after that initial introduction. What was it back then? What was the technology back then, early LED?  Tod Puetz: It was an SMD, It was an early 8x8 millimeter SMD back then. I refer to it as antiquated, but back then, it was pretty fresh and new. But yeah, just the idea of being able

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Every so often I'll get a call or email from an industry friend asking me about a software company called Zynchro, because they were in the mix, or the incumbent, on some sort of deal that was in play. Yes, I'd say. I've heard of them. But that was about it. Well, that's changed, as I had a good chat recently with Jose Behar, one of the two brothers who founded the company some 30 years ago. Zynchro has very quietly built up a nice book of business, mostly in the United States, with SaaS software marketed on the basis of flexibility, rock-solid reliability and low annual costs. By its own admission, the Dallas-based company operates very quietly. But the installed base is north of 50,000 devices, many of them involving a couple of giant global brands. Like most whale clients, Zynchro can't quite say who those are ... but have a listen, and it becomes fairly obvious. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jose, thank you for joining me. I have heard about Zynchro, but we've never met, at least, I don't think so, and while I've heard about the company, I don't know a lot about it, and you're one of those companies that seems to be very active, quite successful, but kinda an old World War II submarine. You're running silent and deep.  Jose Behar: Yes, we were silent for a long time. Even when my brother and I started a company 30 years ago, we started doing multimedia and CGI animation, and one of our ways to do business was to keep networking, being a little bit silent on the media, but having a lot of reputation among client to client, mouth to mouth.  So if I bumped into you in an elevator, and I'm not in this business and asked, oh, what do you do? What does your company do? What would you tell them?  Jose Behar: Zynchro is a digital signage platform SaaS, software as a service. So, our clients can use Zynchro for different kinds of applications and in a lot of vertical markets. Zynchro is not only a content manager. Maybe a lot of our clients, or the people that hear about us, look at us as content managers, but we have different modules. We now have four modules, and we are developing two more for health monitoring for all the players in the network. Also, analytics, all kinds of different analytics for interactive and non-interactive presentations. Of course, the content management, and we also have the campaign module. The campaign module is the monetizing area.  One of our biggest clients is one the biggest retailers in the market. They are using this campaign module, and you can see different media and articles saying that they are making billions of dollars using their digital signage. and now all the stores and all their home office and some distribution centers are using our software to communicate and to control their digital signage.  So the campaign manager is basically enabling a retail media network? Jose Behar: That's right. The idea is creating a TV network where our clients can sell their advertising spaces, and they can have all the inventory and all the reports that they need in order to show their clients all the information.  There are a hell of a lot of companies out there that do what you do. You've been at it for a very long time, three decades. What is it about what you do that differentiates it from the scores of other companies who have a pretty similar offer. Everybody has their unique aspects to it, but what is it about yours? Jose Behar: We don't use other hardware or software APIs. For example, one of the players that we use is BrightSign, and we know all the insights of the player. We are able to be a standalone. We don't need their software to be useful.  Another thing is that we are the owners of the intellectual property, and we develop everything completely. So our clients are able to ask us for different kinds of customizations, all kinds of customizations we have done with all of our cl

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Digital menu boards have long been marketed and positioned as a way to deal digitally with how what's available to order can change through a business day. I'd argue much of the critical thinking around how to do menu boards well hasn't progressed much beyond ensuring the item descriptions and prices are large enough for customers to read from the other side of an order counter. New York-based software and services firm SmarterSign has been in the digital signage industry for coming on 20 years, and has found something of a niche in working with QSR chains on optimized menu boards that are not only legible and visually pleasing, but boost sales performance for operators. Co-founder Gregg Zinn has an interest and passion for the science of advertising and marketing, and he's started writing a series called Digital Menu Board Mastery that gets into the design and psychological weeds of how to lay out and manage menu boards that influence customer ordering decisions and drive higher profits for operators. In this podcast, we get into some interesting things that most menu board sellers and users have probably never considered - stuff like psychological pricing anchors and the so-called golden zones for menu layouts. It's a really interesting chat ... Greg, thank you for joining me. Just to get started, can you give me a rundown on SmarterSign, what it is, how long you've been around, that sort of thing?  Gregg Zinn: Sure. Thank you very much for having me. SmarterSign was founded in 2006, so we've been doing this for just short of 20 years and it was founded by me and my primary business partner, Peter. We got together and both came from technology consulting, building applications for larger organizations, helping them understand how to use technology to make their businesses operate better.  I had actually done some digital signage. My first digital signage was done at Mall of America in the mid 90s working with Mel Simon, I have always been very intrigued by it. I had this vision of a Blade Runner future, where every surface was a communication vehicle and I was just very fascinated with the concept of digital signage, and I also saw that it was gonna be a burgeoning industry that had a lot of runway for the industry to grow and when we looked at the industry, we really found that there were two kinds of providers in the industry, and you probably remember back then, there were providers who were very technology oriented like Cisco, who were very good at moving data around networks, but didn't really have a lot of tools for content control. And there were companies like Scala who had a great software platform, a really powerful software platform, but it didn't really allow business operators to take complete control, and we saw that as the sweet spot for digital signage is moving business operators closer to their message and being able to impact their communication, whether it was in a corporate communication environment, a retail environment, or really what became our biggest market, which is food service, restaurants, digital menu boards.  I think a lot of the reason why digital menu boards became such a big and important part of our business is because of this approach of moving that communication control closer to the business operator. We've spent close to 20 years really working on perfecting as much as we can the tools to bring that vision to life.  So would you describe the company as a CMS software company or more of a solutions firm?  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, that's a great question. So really we view ourselves as two parts of the same solution. One is, one is a software provider that provides great software for controlling digital signage networks, and that's end-to-end from content creation, scheduling, distribution, and playback, and then the other piece is really the services piece of it, and I think that is equally important to the softw

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The next plus-sized pro AV trade show on the annual calendar is InfoComm, coming up in mid-June in, yuck, Orlando, Florida. I'm always curious about what will be new and different with the show, and that's particularly the case in 2025, because there's a new person running things. Jenn Heinold joined show owner/operator AVIXA late last year as the Senior VP Expositions, Americas, so for the last several weeks she's been in drinking-from-the-firehose mode as she learns more and more about the industry, ecosystem and how people think about and use InfoComm. Heinold is a lifer in the trade show business, and while she has run tech-centric trade shows, pro AV is new to her. We had a really good conversation that gets into her impressions and thoughts about the industry, her perspective on ISE, the AVIXA co-owned sister show, and plans for what will be her first InfoComm in June - including what will be different and new. We also get into what, if anything, will be affected by all the trade and geopolitical turmoil that's bubbled up since the US presidency had its four year shuffle. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jenn, thank you very much for coming on. You've been on the job for how long now?  Jenn Heinold: I've been with AVIXA for just over three months. I joined in December as the Senior Vice President of Expositions for the Americas, and I'm over InfoComm in the U.S., which will be June 11th through the 13th in Orlando, Florida and then I'm also responsible for our new InfoComm America Latina launch event, which will be in October in Mexico City.  Did you know anything about the Pro AV sector before you got involved?  Jenn Heinold: No, honestly. I ran the largest satellite technology show in the U.S. for 15 years. So I've worked in technology, but Pro AV is different and I find myself now everywhere I go looking for display screens and how audio sounds. It's so fascinating how quickly you become immersed within the industry and you notice that it's everywhere and it makes our experiences better.  You'll be a display nerd in no time.  Jenn Heinold: I'm working on it. So have you always been in the trade show business?  Jenn Heinold: I have, yes, I dedicated my career to trade shows. I am super passionate about what happens in a face-to-face environment. I love the serendipity of it. I love that what I do helps businesses grow. The community aspect is amazing, right? Bringing people together with a common goal or challenge. The education that we can provide at trade shows. You can do a month's worth of meetings in three days. You can do a trip around the world in three days in some cases, right?  So I just love the format and really believe in what it can do for businesses and I'm excited to produce InfoComm. Because you had some background working with technology trade shows, has there been much of a learning curve? Setting apart the obvious that there are different companies and all that, but I guess their needs aren't all that dissimilar, are they?  Jenn Heinold: No, I think the commonality in working on technology shows is that you have the same structure where there are channel partners that are working to sell and integrate products, but then you also have all of the end users who use a specific technology. So I think it's important for us to be a forum for both Pro AV as well as our end-user audiences, and make sure that they each are fulfilled and feel welcome at the show and find value in the show.  You went to Integrated Systems Europe a few weeks ago, I saw you there. That was your first big Pro AV trade show, I assume, and I'm curious about your impressions.  Jenn Heinold: Oh, gosh, I was blown away by ISE. How could you not be? But for me, I was just so impressed by what the exhibitors did on the show floor. They really pulled out all the stops for ISE and the energy is amazing. It was so valuable for me to

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The UK-based research and advisory firm Futuresource Consulting sends a big team every year to the ISE trade show in Barcelona, and then a few weeks later releases a big report that serves as a technical recap for the pro AV community - both for people who could not attend, and for people like me who did, but didn't have anywhere near enough time to see everything. The 2025 report is out now and the good news is that it is a free download - a departure for a company that produces detailed reports that are typically paywalled and tend to cost at least four figures. In this podcast, I chat with Ted Romanowitz, a principal consultant focused mainly on LED, and Morris (or Mozz) Garrard, who heads the pro displays file and looks more at LCD and OLED. We get into a bunch of things in a too-short 30 minute interview. You'll hear about mass-transferred Chip On Board tech. Where Chip On Glass, also known as MicroLED, is at. And we also get into LCD, OLED, e-paper and projection. Have a listen. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Ted and Morris, thank you for joining me. You guys are from Futuresource Consulting.  Every big trade show, like an ISE or an Infocomm and some other ones as well, but those are the ones I'm most familiar with, Futuresource sends a whole bunch of people to these shows. I'm curious how many people at Futuresource are on the pro display file, and why do you go to trade shows like ISE?  Morris Garrard: Dave, I'm glad to jump in. Thank you again for your time today, and looking forward to tossing with you. Overall, we took nearly 20 analysts and business development people to ISE which shows Futuresource’s commitment to the trade show and our clients, specifically the Pro AV, we took four analysts, and I'm on the consulting and advisory side, so we had a really good representation across all the technologies: projection, flat panel, interactive, and LED.  I assume the reason that you go is it's a very efficient way to see a whole bunch of new stuff and touch base with a whole bunch of companies under one roof in a matter of days. Morris Garrard: Oh, absolutely. For me, it's just always, you walk in and you hit that Hall 3 where a lot of the display companies are, and it's just. Like that first impression you go, oh my gosh, here we are. How am I gonna do all this?  It's always nice. I always start at the Lang booth because they always do a nice job of having that big wow something right there at the major intersection. Yeah, they've done well with that. One thing about Futuresource is that the great majority of the material you put out is understandably paywalled. That's your business, you're producing subject matter expertise reports and selling them. So I'm always a bit curious about a complete 180 with these post-show reports. They're very detailed, there are many pages, and it's almost boy, that's more than you needed to do. Morris Garrard: Yes, I think it's, this year was something between 40 and 50 pages to cover the many, different areas of our practices, but, yeah, we think it adds value to our clients to see the latest and greatest, what's happening and not just a reporting of this product announcement or that product announcement, but it provides the context of what's really happening the undercurrents and the, big stories, the technology transitions, if you will, that are happening that are driving shifts in the industry. That kind of helps us open doors with clients to have deeper Engagements with them based on our unique insights.  Ted Romanowitz: I think just to add to that as well is we don't produce these show reports solely for the benefit of our clients. We also work with an extensive research network that benefits from these show reports, as well as other industry bodies that we work with, like trade associations, for example, and our channel partners as well.  It's a way, obviously, that yo

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT All kinds of people in this industry are very aware that while there is lot of dodgy stuff, there is also lots of well made display technology available from Chinese manufacturers who have zero brand recognition outside of that country. Buy potential buyers don't tend to have the time or resources to make the big flights over the Pacific to visit China and directly source reliable manufacturing partners. And they really - if they're smart - don't want to just order stuff, and then cross their fingers and toes hoping the stuff shows up, lines up with what was ordered, works, and then meets necessary certifications. Jacob Horwitz saw an opportunity to create a new company that functions as something as a boutique digital signage distribution company that sources, curates and markets display and related technologies that its resellers can then take to market. Horwitz will be familiar to a lot of industry people for a pair of installation companies he started and ran the U.S. - IST and later Zutek. In both cases, he sold the companies, and he could have just retired ... but he didn't want to retire. Nor did his wife, because a Jacob with too much time on his hands would make her crazy. So he started Illuminology with a longtime industry friend and business partner Stephen Gottlich, who for many years ran the digital file for Gable. I caught up with Horwitz to talk about the origins and rationale for Illuminology, which is just spinning up but has some big plans. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jacob, it was nice speaking with you. You have started a company called Illuminology, which sounds like you started a cult, but I think that's not what it is.  Jacob Horwitz: Not yet, no, We hope it will be at some point, a good following, but first off, Dave, thanks for having me. It's been nine years since you and I first chatted on a podcast. I don't know if you realize that. It was December of 2016, and we had just finished, I think maybe the nationwide rollout of Burger King, you and I had a chat about that, and it's hard to believe nine years have gone by.  This was when you had IST?  Jacob Horwitz: Installation Service Technologies was a nationwide installation and service company, that was sold in 2018 and then a year later, I restarted a company called Zootech, and I was approached by a customer who was looking to be entrepreneurial and that company is now owned by Karen Salmon. It's a woman-owned business mow, and her father was the founder of Powerpoint of Sale. I took a couple of years off. I have a person that I have worked with for 30 years, my business partner, Stephen Gottlich. I think you've met Stephen, and he has been working with Gable Signs for the last 17 years and I think what Illuminology is now is a culmination of really two parallel journeys. Stephen took a traditional sign company 17 years ago down a path of innovation, and Gable went from a bending metal traditional sign company to a visual solutions company my background, which has been installation and service for the last 20 years, brings together two people who are a little bit older than when you and I first talked nine years ago.  It was probably 60 pounds ago when I talked to you for the first time. I'm a little gray or a little wiser and a little bit older. So the two of us come from really parallel journeys in different areas of digital signage, and we wanted to create something a little different in the United States. We'd seen some business models and other parts of the world that seem to be working. So we wanted to create a marketplace that would expand digital signage to companies interested in expanding their scope of business. So we focus a lot on traditional sign companies other technology-type companies, and installation companies. They all have some type of footprint in the verticals with technology but they're not carrying digital signa

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

Countless companies have tried sticking a screen above things in public spaces, thinking - or more appropriately hoping - that the scenario and dynamics were something that would interest brand advertisers. I won't say it never worked, but there's a lot of roadkill. A company out of Vancouver, on Canada's west coast, is going at this notion - but in a very different way. Intuitive puts 43-inch displays just to the rear of trash stations in busy public and private spaces. But instead of just running booked ad campaigns, the main purpose of the screens and supporting AI-driven tech is to change consumer behaviors. A computer vision camera uses AI-based pattern detection to look at the trash someone is about to drop into receptacles, and tells them what goes where. We've probably all had a last sip of a coffee-to-go, stopped to drop ti in the trash and recycling station, and then stood there wondering which bins to drop things in. The company, whose founders have roots in robotics, had quite a bit of success selling ready-to-go systems to organizations. on the basis that teaching consumers to correctly sort their trash would save a lot of back-end labor and time. But customers were buying one or two systems for big venues, because that's what budgets would allow. Even though 10 or 20 were needed. Based on a lot of real-world experience and enthusiasm from brands, Intuitive has now pivoted to a more traditional place-based digital media model. The business has blown up, with 10s of 1,000s of installs under contract, including a big partnership with Pepsico. I had a great chat with co-founder and CEO Hassan Murad, who calls himself the company's chief trash talker. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Hassan, thank you for coming on my podcast. I was at Digital Signage Experience a few weeks ago and wandered around the trade show floor. It wasn't all that big or crowded with stands, but I saw the stand for your company and kind of went right on by because I have this attitude based on years of seeing companies trying to put advertising screens atop damn near anything.  But I was compelled by a business friend to have another look and stop and talk with you guys. It was actually very interesting what you're up to. So can you explain what Intuitive does and how it got started? Hassan Murad: For sure. And again, Dave, thank you for having us. I'm Hassan Murad, the co-founder, CEO, and chief trash talker here at Intuitive. What Intuitive started out as - I'll take you back to myself and Vivek Vyas, who's the other co-founder of Intuitive. Both of us grew up in India and Pakistan, were born there and our families at different points immigrated to Dubai. Then we met when we were doing robotics here in Canada, in Vancouver. Our whole background was in robotics and AI. As we were starting to step foot in the real world, we had gained experiences working on drones to detect wildfires or for impact applications, submarines to do amazing things in an autonomous way, self-driving cars down at Tesla. Previously, I was proud to share working alongside Elon, but now I'm very careful. Yeah, that's not necessarily an association you want anymore. Hassan Murad: You have to be careful for sure. I describe him as the smartest person you can ever experience working for or be with, and a pioneer of this world. And at the same time, he's the dumbest person you could ever think of. But I hope this doesn't make it to him or else he will start bashing us as well. I think he has a list to go through first before he finds us. Hassan Murad: I hope so. The way that he fires off his tweets or whatever he calls it at X is just insane. Anyways, back to the point. We’re both working on robotics applications and being flat on the walls in different zero to one moments where industries were being completely revolutionized by AI and we asked ourselves the question that for the next couple of years, if we are going to jump in and wor

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The people who build and maintain very large networks of displays, PCs, servers and other devices tend to have more to do than time to do it, and when some technical shit hits the operating fan, trying to work out what's happening and what to do about it takes experience, brainpower and what can be punishing downtime. So what if generative AI could be used by a network operations center team to comb through knowledge bases and trouble ticket archives to identify solutions in seconds, instead of minutes or hours? And what if a lot of meat and potato workflows done to deliver services and maintain uptimes could be automated, and handled by an AI bot? That's the premise of Netspeek, a start-up that formally came out of stealth mode this week - with an AI-driven SaaS solution aimed at integrators, solutions providers and enterprise-level companies that use a lot of AV gear. The Boston-based company is focused more at launch on unified communications, because of the scale and need out there. But Netspeek's toolset is also applicable to digital signage, and can bolt on to existing device management solutions. The guy driving this will be familiar in digital signage hardware circles. Erik DeGiorgi was running the specialty PC firm MediaVue, but sold that company about a year ago. Since then, he's been forehead-deep working with a small dev team on Netspeek. We caught up last week and he gave me the rundown. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Erik, nice to chat once again. You sold your company about a year ago, and I don't want to say disappeared, but kind of went off the grid in terms of digital signage, and now you are launching a new company called Netspeek. What is that?  Erik DeGiorgi: Thanks for having me back, Dave. It's crazy. Time flies. I think it's well over two years at this point since our last conversation.  We launched Netspeek at the beginning of the year. At the same time, we sold out MediaVue. Netspeek is bringing to market the first generative AI platform focused on supporting the day-to-day operations of mixed vendor estates of pro AV networks. Digital signage is certainly a component of that. We're really focused on the totality of pro AV technologies. So it includes a lot of UCC unified collaborations and communications technologies as well as signage, and really targeting office spaces. So think about meeting rooms and conference rooms. You might have a Zoom or a Teams environment in there as well as a signage system or classroom environments, and what we've developed is a generative AI solution that can be embedded into those networks, that can work alongside human operators, network administrators, technicians to help them support them in their daily workflows, and then also bring a large amount of automation. So our platform can not only kind of observe what's going on in a network, kind of a 24/7-365 way, but then take action and use its own logic and reason and independent thinking to analyze situations the same way a human operator would and then structure and generate responses. So being able to directly address equipment and solve problems independently. We're pretty excited to bring that to market. We're launching to the industry here in a week, and then we'll be demoing at ISE at the beginning of February.  You’ll have your own stand at ISE? Erik DeGiorgi: Yes, and I did pull up the booth number ahead of the call, but of course now it's on a different tab. It's in the Innovation Park, and the booth number is CS820, and it's actually centrally located there in the Innovation Park. So actually right outside the digital signage area.  Yeah, I think for people going to ISE, the Innovation Park is kind of along the main corridor in between halls.  Erik DeGiorgi: Yep, it's the central hallway.  Okay, so people should be able to find you there.  Erik DeGiorgi: Hopefully, yep.  Not a sprawling booth lik

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, looki

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

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

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Sensors and triggered content have been part of digital signage for probably 20 years, but they weren't widely used for a lot of that time because putting a solution together involved a lot of planning and custom electronics. A Dutch company called Nexmosphere has changed all that, offering a wide range of different sensors that trigger content to digital signage screens by sensing the presence of people or reacting to an action, like someone lifting a product up from shelf to get a better look. Nexmosphere has developed its own set of low-cost custom sensors and controllers that make it fast and easy for digital signage solutions companies, including pure-play CMS software shops, to add triggered content capabilities. Nexmosphere focuses on the hardware and makes an API available to partners. I chatted with CEO Hubert van Doorne about the company's roots and how his customers are now using sensors to drive engagement in retail. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Thank you for joining me. Can you give listeners a rundown on what Nexmosphere is all about?  Hubert van Doorne: Oh, yes. I’d love to do that. Nexomsphere is all about sensors for digital signage and to make any digital signage system interactive and by interactive, we do not mean only by pressing a button or touching something on a screen, but it's much more of letting the digital signage installation respond to actually the person in front of it. So it can be a presence sensor. It can be something that you touch or lift the product and that way make an interactive system at Nexmosphere, build a platform of a lot of different sensors that can be hooked up easily to the system and in that way for the system integrator and really help in building this sort of system. It's something that's been done for decades by a lot of companies who made their own sensors so in that case, it’s not real rocket science, but the beauty of the product is that you can take any of these sensors, bring them together and you don't need any development time to have a proof of concept running and I think that's the real strong point of what we offer.  Yeah, I've been in this sector for a very long time, and I can remember, when I was working with one company, we had a guy who I think worked out of a motor home somewhere in Arizona or California or something like that, and he would design boards that could be used for very early iterations of sensor-based detection, presence sensor, that sort of thing, but it was a lot of work and there was nothing off the shelf that you could buy to do all that. I suspect that there's a whole bunch of companies that said, “Oh, thank God, I can just order this and it's already sorted out.”  Hubert van Doorne: Exactly. It's actually also how the company started in 2015. We were a part of a display company making POS materials for in-store and we developed our own sensor set for Sonos and for Philips to go into the European stores, but what we saw is that the number of stores was heavily declining and the complexity of every system was really growing. So we needed something modular that was not just for one group of displays. We needed something for five thousand, you could make the same part of electronics, but now we need it for 200 stores, something still affordable to build, and that's how the idea started off of making a more standard solution that you can plug and play. And, first, when we came to the market, everybody was like, “No, we will build something ourselves, that's much easier.” But then, over time you saw these numbers of installations decline. concept stores would only be maybe five stores or ten stores and then slowly evolve over time and that was getting difficult to make something really solid, and robust in small numbers. So that's where we really saw that the companies coming to us. Like indeed, what you say, thank you, you're develo

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There are not a lot of companies that have been involved in what we now call digital signage for 44 years, but Videotel has been selling technology that puts marketing information on screens since 1980. The company started with VCRs (younger readers may have to Google that) and then started designing, manufacturing and selling DVD players that, unlike consumer devices, would happily play out a set of repeating video files for weeks, months and years. Back in the days before fast internet connections, cloud computing and small form factor PCs, that's how a lot of what we now know as digital signage was done. About 14 years ago, the San Diego-area company added dedicated, solid state digital signage media players - and that product line has steadily grown to include networked and interactive versions. The company also now has interactive accessories for stuff like lift and learn, and directional speakers that help drive experiences in everything from retail to museums. I had a good conversation with Lisa Schneider, who runs sales and marketing, and Travis McMahand, Videotel's CTO. We get into the company's roots, the evolution to solid state media players, and how Videotel successfully competes with $400 and higher players, when at least part of the buyer market seems driven mostly by finding devices that are less than $100. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Thank you for joining me. Can you introduce yourselves and tell me what Videotel is all about?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, absolutely. Hello, Dave. Thank you for having both Travis and me today. We appreciate it. My name is Lisa Schneider and I am the executive vice president for sales and marketing for our company, Videotel Digital. We were founded in 1980. Gosh, it's been almost 44 years now, back when we were manufacturing top-loading VCRs, that went into industrial-grade DVD players, and now in the last 14 years, we are manufacturing digital signage media players. We have interactive solutions that include various sensors like motion sensors, proximity sensors, and weight sensors. We've got mechanical LED push buttons and touchless IR buttons and RFID tags, and things like that that create interactive displays. We also provide directional audio speakers. We have various form factors for all types of projects, and then we also have Travis on the line with us. I'll let Travis introduce himself.  Travis McMahand: Oh, hi, I'm Travis McMahand I am the CTO of Videotel Digital.  Where's the company based? Is it in San Diego?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, we are in, it's San Diego. It's actually Chula Vista, borderline San Diego. So in California.  San Diego area.  Lisa Schneider: Yes, San Diego area. Beautiful San Diego.  So I've been aware of your company forever and going all the way back to the days when you were doing industrial grade, commercially oriented DVD players. In the early days of digital science before things were networked, that's what people were using and if you used a regular DVD player or even a VCR or something like that, the thing was really not set up to play over and over again if you were using just like a consumer-grade device. So the whole idea was you were, you guys developed commercial-grade versions that were rated to last, for days, weeks, months, years. Is that accurate?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, that is accurate, and it was, that was our flagship product back in the day. That was because we made a truly industrial-grade player and it would auto power on, auto seamlessly loop and repeat without any manual interaction, even without a remote. So it was a looping player.  We actually still have three different types of industrial-grade DVD players that we still offer. They're actually really popular in healthcare facilities because they are specifically UL-approved for medical DVD players still, and they are still out there and, we are still producing them.  T

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT One of the particularly interesting things about Outform is how a company that's been doing digital in retail for 20-plus years is not all that well known in digital signage circles. Not that it's hurt the Miami-based company, which has offices and manufacturing facilities all over the world, and has delivered countless tech-centered shopper engagement solutions for some of the world's biggest brands. I'd been operating mostly with the impression that Outform designed nice-looking digital fixtures for retail, but there is a lot more to the company than that. They do the whole nine yards of retail from idea through execution. I had a great chat that could have gone on for a few hours with Outform founder Ariel Haroush. We started with the company's roots and how Haroush kind of fell into scalable digital solutions for retail. We get into how the company works and the state of things like retail media. Then we spend quite a bit of time talking about Haroush's ambitious new venture, called Future Stores. It takes the notion of pop-up stores, and gives it the scale and digital experience demanded by big global brands. The first location opens in central London on October 30th. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Ariel, thanks for joining me. For those who don't know, can you give a rundown of what Outform does and their background?  Ariel Haroush: Outform is a retail marketing company in essence. We've been referred to as an innovation agency because we are very much on the cutting edge of retail, experiential, and innovation in retail. The company does everything from design all the way to execution, which is quite unique because we have the ability to ideate and strategize like a typical agency that you would expect. But we are transitioning seamlessly into the execution room. So everything we ideate, we engineer, we prototype and we manufacture. So while the business has a very, I would say appeal of an agency, we are, in essence, a manufacturer at scale, and we have manufacturing facilities all over the world in three main regions in Europe, in Asia, and in the States alone, we have two manufacturing facilities, both in Chicago and in San Francisco. Did you start as a manufacturer and evolve into an agency or vice versa, or none of the above?  Ariel Haroush: My journey as the founder of Outform was quite unique. My passion for the industry actually started when I watched the movie Back to the Future. I'm sure you remember Marty flying all the way to the future with the DeLorean and then you see this billboard transform into a shark, and I was just mesmerized by it, and there's something in it that made me say, “oh my God, this is what I want to do.”  So when I started my career, I was always very much leaning to the visual aspect of things. I had an office in Times Square and I was looking at all the signage there and I went, geez, why no one is doing it on a commercial level, and that was the seed of founding Outform. So I started really with no manufacturing background, but with a lot of passion towards how spectacular signage should be, and I was able to convince one customer to give me an opportunity. Back in the days it was Siemens and I had done this huge mobile phone replicas in, one of the biggest trade shows called CeBIT and that was an experience, and one thing led to another, the second customer was Samsung, and I was moving from one customer to another, creating those experiences.  As things evolved, one of the biggest opportunities that I've got was a customer, in the United States, in Chicago that said, “Hey, are you doing all this massive, spectacular signage. Would you mind doing something smaller in scale?” I said what do you mean by that? He said, we don't need giant signage. We need something that we can fit into a retail store, and I said, okay, what do you have in mind? He said, I need 20 mobile phone

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The Outdoor Advertising Association of America represents and guides the interests and activities of some 850 member organizations across the US, including the biggest media companies, brands that do a lot of outdoor, agencies, ad-tech providers, and suppliers. That's billboard, of course, but also the other formats for advertising, from transit shelters to place-based media networks on TVs in venues like bars, clinics and workout studios The OAAA has been around since 1891, and these days is seeing rapid growth for the medium, especially on the digital side. If they're not already doing digital, most OAAA members are going down that path and also adopting technologies like AI. I had a really good chat, about a bunch of things, with Anna Bager - the association's President and CEO. We get into the state of the medium, which is particularly busy because of ALL the money flowing into political advertising. We also touch on issues like a need to simplify the planning, buying and distribution ecosystem, and the OAAA's perspective and activity around something that's huge in other regions like Europe - sustainability. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Anna, thank you for joining me. This is going to be a simple question to start out with, but can you tell me what the OAAA does and why it exists?  Anna Bager: Absolutely, so we are the Out of Home Advertising Association of America and we are what I would call a classic trade association. We focus on two things. We want to protect the industry and we want to grow the industry. So on the protection front, we have a pretty big government affairs unit. We do state and federal lobbying on things that really matter to the industry, such as the First Amendment, anything real estate, infrastructure, and the Highway Beautification Act, which controls the number of signs or at least roadside that you can have in the US and privacy is another area that we're increasingly interested in privacy and data regulation. Keeping an eye on what's happening, making sure that there are no laws that don't work well for the industry that is being passed or hopefully not, and, also looking for opportunities, where we can, as an industry where we can maybe benefit from some of the legislation and more things that are happening in DC or state level that can work well for the industry.  So that's one part lobbying and government affairs and a lot of legal operations, and then the other part is the growth side, and for that, we do research on behalf of the industry. We do a lot of promotion of the industry at our own events or other events. We're out there talking to advertisers and brands about why they should be. Spending more money, and investing more out-of-home, and then we create guidelines, standards, and frameworks that help the industry operate better and make it easier to buy and sell. I think that sums it up.  It’s a member organization?  Anna Bager: It's a member organization. We are the largest out-of-home association, I think, in the world, actually. We have probably close to 800 members and pretty much everyone who is in the out-of-home industry in the US and some other international members.  So this would be Lamar all the way down to an almost hyper-local kind of media owner? Anna Bager: It would definitely be but it could also be a gas station TV. It could be a cinema. It could be Airports and transit, so we cover it all. It's not just the roadside, it's all the different formats.  Is there a cutoff? I'm curious about some of what they call faster consumer TV networks like Atmosphere and Loop and so on that are in bars and it's a streaming app. Anna Bager: They are members too. Okay, so where would you cut it off?  Anna Bager: I don't cut it off. I think we welcome anyone as a member if they're in out-of-home advertising, which is, we're called out-of-home, but if I had been the one to

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I was buzzing around the InfoComm trade show earlier this year, I stopped at one stand for a chat, looked at the next stand over, and saw some familiar faces from Poppulo - the rebranded name for a company long known in digital signage industry circles as Four Winds Interactive. I went over and got caught up on what the company was up to and why it was showing at InfoComm, as I had grown in recent years to regard Poppulo - right or wrong - as being primarily focused on omnichannel workplace communications. I was mostly wrong, though I think it is fair to say that in the wake of a private-equity backed merger of Four Winds with an Irish company that did employee communications, there was marketing more noise for at least a while on the workplace side. David Levin, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Four Winds, stepped back from that role almost a year ago now, and I had been wanting to do a podcast with new CEO Ruth Fornell, whose background was well  outside the signage and workplace comms industries. After a preliminary chat, and me saying I'd poke away at her about digital signage stuff, she suggested I'd be in better hands with Joe Giebel, who has been with the company almost 20 years and is its Senior VP of Digital Signage. Joe and I get into a bunch of things in our chat, including the journey of blending technologies and culture, and the shifting needs and profiles of customers. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Joe, nice to catch up with you. It's been a while. Can you tell me what your role is at Poppulo?  Joe Giebel: Yeah, absolutely. My current role is Senior Vice President of Digital Signage, which is a fresh title for me. I'm coming out as a vice president of sales for America's role, where I've been fortunate to lead a number of our sales teams. For those who don't know Poppulo, there, a lot of the digital signage folks will probably know you or know the company more as Four Winds Interactive, but that changed, what about five, six years ago now?  Joe Giebel: That's right. I think we did that in 2021. So not too long ago, but, yeah, let me give a little bit of a history.  Four Winds Interactive was founded in 2005 as a digital signage company and remains so, but right around 2020, we started looking at different opportunities to enhance our offering, and made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was a company called Poppulo, which was the best-in-class enterprise, internal communications tool. So we brought them into the mix and when we did that, we started to look at the names, like how do we go to market and how do we want to do business as, and so we started doing market studies and it turns out that the name Poppulo, which loosely comes from a Latin term for the term “people” resonated and we decided to change the name to Poppulo. Four Winds Interactive serves as a parent company. We do business as Poppulo and the name Four Winds Interactive was always interesting and people wanted to know what's the origin of that name and its significance, and there wasn't a big story there. So I think we were open to considering a new brand and look and feel, and that's the story, Dave.  Yeah, if we go way, way back to almost 20 years ago, Four Winds kind of got its start with those little semi-electronic touch panels that you would play back samples of music, right? Joe Giebel: That is correct, and they were dealing with specialty media. So there was a company called, Four Winds Trading. That company was dealing with specialty media and a lot of it had to do with native tribes. So the Four Winds related there a little bit more. During that business, they started to think about how do we get loyalty around the distribution of our media titles and different things that we're distributing, and of course, screens were new at the time and media in an interactive format is very engaging, and so they were looking at

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Projection has always been something of a fringe player in digital signage because of a series of technical barriers to adoption, most notably the limited operating life of the lamps, and the product and labor costs of switch them out. Laser projection has addressed that issue, but the other one that's harder to conquer is dealing with ambient light. Unless the projector is the size of a fridge, super-bright and seriously expensive, the environment's lights need to be off or dimmed and any windows covered. A startup called Obsidian Screens, based on the fringes of greater Toronto, has developed a projection screen that can show visuals that aren't washed out even with the lights on and the blinds open - and as the brand name suggests, the screens are black instead of white or silver. It's a super-thin laminated material light enough to marry with foam - like a poster with a 1/4-inch foam backing to make it rigid and ready to hang. Co-founder Chris Cavalieri and his business partner use Ambient Light Rejecting technology - something that's been around for years - but have their own "nanofilter" technology that does a better job, he says, of preserving projector brightness and visibility. And just as is the case with LED video walls, the more black on the display surface, the better the contrast. The company has been around for seven years, but remains quite small ... as they have struggled to find the right partners to specify, sells and deploy their tech. They've run into at least a couple of challenges - with end-users who were disappointed by conventional projection set-ups, and pro AV integrators who for logical reasons want to sell systems that cost a lot more and need ongoing paid support and services. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Chris, thanks for joining me. You're based outside of the Greater Toronto Area and you've been working for a few years now on a company called, well, a product called Obsidian. Can you run through all of that for me?  Chris Cavalieri: Sure thing. Thanks for having me, Dave. I really appreciate taking the time to talk about it and boy, do I have lots to say. You have half an hour. Go! Chris Cavalieri: All right. Perfect. No pressure. So Obsidian, I should probably talk a little bit about projection. So what we've been trying to do and we've been doing for a while, is trying to find a way to take all the benefits. So if anyone's in digital signage, I assume there's a few listening to this what incredible things can be done with projection. So things like projection mapping holographic displays, very unique, creative stuff, and it's absolutely fantastic, and when we started out, we looked at things and said, like, why isn't this used more?  You know, we go to retail stores, we're going to shopping centers and there are LEDs, we've got LCD video walls now and only a few set cases, maybe a performance or display are using projection to its full potential and it begs the question is why, and that why is how we found it, our idea of Obsidian, which is to create a solution to get those benefits projection and make it a lot more accessible and practical in place of, or as an option compared to say our elite typical LED signage and LCD video walls.  So, I mean, projection, it's very renovation friendly, it's very scalable, and depending on what projector you use, it can be quite a low cost, the benefits are endless, and compared to LEDs, which are quite glaring, most of the time, I'm biased, obviously, no shame in that, but most people don't want to stare at an LED board as a backing, screen for like a speaker stage, for example, casino games. We've talked to fellows in Vegas before. It causes fatigue for people who are near them for too long. And that's, that comes down to the human eye and there's a whole science behind it, the wavelength of lights and all that. I won't go into it. It works.