The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The World Out Of Home Organization has been around for decades, but under a French acronym that didn't mean a lot to much of the world. The non-profit changed its name from FEPE International to its new handle a few years ago, and has never looked back.

It now has members from all over the globe - with outdoor advertising companies of all sizes and stripes signing on to benefit from lobbying, networking, policy discussions, standardization, research and education.

The organization also does a heavily attended global conference each year, as well as at least a couple of regional versions in APAC and the Middle East.

I had a great chat with out of home media veteran Tom Goddard, a London-based Irishman who gives his time and experience as the organization's President and Executive Chairman.

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TRANSCRIPT

Tom, thank you for joining me. Where are you today? 

Tom Goddard: Yeah, nice to be here, David. I'm in sunny London. We're having a Mediterranean type of summer, which is a hit and miss here, but we're having a lovely summer at the moment and I'm right in Hyde Park, so I'm looking into the park and all the joggers. So it's a lovely spot, it's about 28 degrees, so pretty cool. 

Hopefully you have air conditioning! 

Tom Goddard: Yeah, but I hate using it. I've had to use it a bit lately, but yes, I do. 

So you are the head of the World Out of Home Organization? Can you give me the background on yourself and what that organization is all about?

Tom Goddard: Yeah, of course, David. For my sins, I'm President of the World Out of Home Organization, it's an honorary reposition and the World Out of Home Organization is a not-for-profit body and its purpose is the same now as it was when it was set up 63 years ago. It's really to drive sector growth. 

When the organization was set up in 1959 by Jacques Dauphin who was one of the pioneers of French outdoor media alongside JCDecaux, it was originally called FEPE which is short in French for  Federation European Publicite Exterieur, and in later years, it expanded outside that footprint and became a truly global organization. So in 2018, we decided to rebrand as the World Out of Home Organization, which we launched the following year at our Dubai Congress, which happened just before the pandemic, and so we're now the World Out of Home Organization, but we are 63 years old. 

Yeah, I have known a few people who would make reference to FEPE all the time, like Sheldon Silverman when I was in meetings with him, and I didn't know what he was going on about, but when the name was changed, I was like, “Oh, now I get it!” It’s a more universal name.

Tom Goddard: Yeah. It's very plain and it says what it does. 

With regards to your background, are you a media owner guy or an agency guy or something else?

Tom Goddard: Yeah, I'm a media owner guy. I come from the media owner side and I've had a long career on the media owner side, all the way from a small company started in Ireland to running the International division of CBS Outdoors, as it was then called. More recently I was the chairman of Ocean Outdoor in the UK, which is one of the leading digital out-of-home companies in the premium sector.

Are you still active, or are you still working? 

Tom Goddard: Yeah, I'm still pretty active. I just stepped down from Ocean, just about a year and a half ago, but but I have also got a business called, Out of Home Capital, which I've set up with with eight other very experienced out-of-home professionals, and it's a global advisory business that helps all sectors of the out-of-home ecosystem to achieve their strategic plans. So I'm busy with that alongside my active work in the World Out of Home Organization. 

Out of Home Capital, is that also a funding entity or purely advisory?

Tom Goddard: It's mainly advisory, but we do have access to capital sources, and we do advise, for e

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.

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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

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E-paper displays are, by far, best known for the little e-readers people use instead of printed books. The core technology used for those readers is what's also being used for things like meeting room displays and updated bus stop schedule signs that run off batteries and, in some cases, solar chargers. But that's all been in black and white and gray. Color displays, and particularly displays that can do full motion graphics and video playback, have largely stayed in the bucket of future technology.

A small Dutch company is well along the path of changing all that - using something called electro-wetting display technology that gets its brightness from the sun, and would be used as low-energy alternatives to big LED video displays used for out of home advertising.

In this podcast, I have a detailed chat with Etulipa founder Hans Feil, whose company is rapidly evolving and maturing the technology, and has a big investment and R&D partner in Daktronics, the big South Dakota-based LED manufacturer. We get into what the technology is and how it works, its differences with other kinds of e-paper, how it sets up, and its benefits.

The company is still at the advanced R&D stage, but far enough along that it anticipates being in small quantity production next year, through a manufacturing partner in Taiwan.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hans, thank you very much for joining me. Let's just get right to it. What the heck is electro wetting display technology? 

Hans Feil: That's a good question. It's what they call reflective display technology. Of course, you probably know about it already, but if people don't know, the introduction that I made is that I say you probably will have an e-reader, many people have e-readers nowadays and it's black and white and a little bit slow, but you can read it outdoors. If you take your iPad outdoor in the sun, it's difficult to read. We have something like your the display on the e-reader, but then with color and it's fast, and that's the that's the difference.

So it's a reflective display technology. It reflects light so there's no back light behind, it doesn't emit light. So if you take our display into the dark, you don't see anything unless you light it up with a back light or front light. So that's for newcomers. If you're a chemist or a physicist or a scientist, I’d probably say it a little bit different, in the sense that what we do is that we manipulates liquids colored oils, and we have a layer colored oils and with little cells with oils and we can make small droplets with it and the size of the droplets we can. 

For instance, if you compare to print, many people have ink-jet printers and if they would take a magnifying glass and look at the paper, they're see little cyan, magenta and yellow droplets on the white paper, and what we do is we’re mimicking this printing with cyan, magenta and yellow. So we have a white paper or white reflector, we call it. And we have three layers of glass on top of it with cyan, magenta, and yellow oil and each individual layer, we can switch this oil droplets, making them small or big. And if all the layers are spread, it's black because you don't see anything, all the lights are absorb. And if there are all the droplets are small, white or nearly white and depending on which droplets you switch and can get all the colors of the rainbow, and that's all very low power. 

From what I read on your website, unlike traditional, if you wanna call traditional ePaper, what we would know from E-ink displays primarily, this can do 25 frames per second motion, which is quite a bit different because when you see something change on an ePaper screen, it goes nuts for a fraction of a second as it reorganizes itself. 

Hans Feil: Yes, and in our case, it doesn't really reorganize, droplets just become big or small and it goes very fast. 

Was that a big step t

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

When PJ Thelen talks about the company's software and hardware, he focuses almost entirely on the experiences they enable and deliver, as opposed to the features and specs of the technology.

It's refreshing, because a lot of the conversation and marketing around outdoor displays for directories, wayfinding and advertising has been - at least in recent years - about how they were more than just screens, but smart city devices that did a variety of things, including WiFi connectivity and IoT sensors. Thelen went so far as rebranding the company he now runs from smartLINK to RoveIQ - getting away from the heavily-used smart moniker and emphasizing how Rove speaks to enabling people to navigate a space with intelligent - the IQ bit - guidance.

The company has a CMS, sophisticated mapping, an ad server and analytics capabilities all designed to help people find their way around big places. The early adopters have been commercial properties - like mixed-use lifestyle developments. In many to most cases, those are wayfinding directories with mapping, supported by advertising.

But Thelen sees a lot of possibilities working with large-footprint healthcare, helping people find their way around sprawling medical campuses. There would be physical screens providing guidance, but in his vision, RoveIQ guides people from the time they park in a hospital garage all the way to a specific building, floor and waiting room.

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TRANSCRIPT

Peter, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what RoveIQ is all about? 

Peter (PJ) Thelen: RoveIQ really emphasizes smart kiosks and wayfinding software solutions. 

We just rebranded our organization from smartLINK to RoveIQ and Dave, a big reason for that was we wanted to make sure our new name is better aligned with the solutions that we bring to market and the value that we provide for both our customers and partners. Now the word Rove, it's the whole idea of wandering, discovering, et cetera but the IQ element is to do it in an intelligent fashion. So you have a very efficient and enjoyable experience.

So if somebody listening to this is trying to visualize what you do, the visual that would immediately spring to mind would be a display totem outside in a public plaza or something like that with directory or mapping, correct? 

Peter Thelen: Yeah, without a doubt. So I always use the analogy, Dave, to pretend that you're going to a place for the first time. You're not quite sure where you are or what is around you so you leverage the hardware and our software to understand what is available and then ultimately leveraging either the kiosk experience or the mobile experience allows you to essentially get to where you want to go leveraging a Blue Dot scenario, which obviously is our wayfinding software.

Blue Dot scenario, what do you mean by that, or is that just the name of the software itself? 

Peter Thelen: No, that's just the analogy I use Dave, where if you think about where you are and let's just say, hypothetically, you want to go to a restaurant, the dots correlate to the path that you need to take to go from where you are to where you ultimately want to go.

The old name, smartLINK, connoted the whole idea of smart cities and that there were all kinds of companies coming up with smart city kiosks in the last decade or so, and I don't necessarily see a lot of traction for those sorts of things. Is that kind of driving this as well? What if you better focus on the whole idea of guiding people, as opposed to saying this is this station that will do all these other things to help cities become smarter? 

Peter Thelen: Yeah, we took a step back. RoveIQ is a software company. It just so happens that it needs a hardware platform to promote the value that we drive on a day in and day out basis.

In our minds, smart was widely used. It didn't necessarily correlate to exactly what w

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

New York City is a massive out of home media environment, but much of the attention gets directed to the giant LED boards in Times Square, when there all kinds of other interesting and high opportunity environments that also generate a LOT of eyeballs ... like the ferries across the Hudson River.

Outdoor Solutions Group has many, many years under its belt doing static advertising on the ferries that take commuters back and forth from New Jersey - from wraps on boats and shuttle buses to ad posters and big banners in the ferry terminals.

The company had been slow-walking its digital plans for a variety of reasons, but when COVID hit, the company decided it was time to start converting some of that printed stock to digital. Part of that was triggered by the simple observation that as the economy and riders started coming back from lockdowns, digital interest and buys were coming back faster.

I spoke with Rosemary Valenti, who has spent a long career in New York OOH media circles and fully took over the business when her husband died a few years ago, after a long scrap with cancer. She now has a son helping her out, and partnerships with established digital partners in Broadsign, Pearl Media and TSItouch.

In this podcast, we get into why Valenti's firm took the digital plunge, its challenges and benefits, and her plans to convert more of the print positions to quickly refreshed digital displays.

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TRANSCRIPT

Rosemary Valenti: I'm Rosemary Valenti. I'm the CEO of an Outdoor Solutions Group in New York, and I've been in this out-of-home world for a very long time. I started this company with my husband, Mark Valenti in 1996, but we were both in the out-of-home world prior to that, we were in companies that are now considered outfront media.

And your son's still involved in the business, right? 

Rosemary Valenti: Yes, actually, Matthew was an infant when I started OSG, and then by the time he was 15 we had him, as a courier almost, going in, dropping off mail, that's how he earned his allowance, did some inside of the ferry postings and he was an intern, he was great. He learned a lot of the business and now he is Vice President of Outdoor Solutions Group. 

Nice, and you've run it on your own since you lost your husband? 

Rosemary Valenti: Yes, in 2018, we unfortunately lost Mark to cancer. I took over the helm, but Mark and I did this for years. I had a backseat for a while, and he was more in the forefront when the kids were little, and then I would in those say 10 years, we were just in tandem running it pretty much, and then when he got sick, we needed a little help, and then after that, I just started to run it and then Matthew had some experience at Clear Channel Outdoor for a little bit, and then came in and joined forces with me and is instrumental in everything that we do together. He's great. 

Good. It's nice to have him involved, I guess. 

Rosemary Valenti: Yeah, even my other son has posted things. It was a family affair for a while. But that's not my other son's career path. But we do all participate in this. 

Your environment is transit, and particularly the ferries, along the New York waterways, correct? 

Rosemary Valenti: Yes, New York Waterway Ferries are our business partner, and they specialize in ferrying people from New Jersey waterfront properties or New Jersey over to Manhattan, and then we have locations in Midtown and Brookfield Place, and it was static for a long time, and then we decided to introduce the digital, which we needed to do, especially after COVID. 

We got shut down for a little while in COVID, and had to rebuild it from the ground up, basically. So we had a lot of entertainment, a lot of Broadway, so we lost everything, and also New York Waterway had only essential service for a few months, and so they were shut down, and so we slowly have come back just like man

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Health safety concerns that become top of mind for the whole planet back in March 2020 led to a lot of assumptions that the interactive display business was going to go touchless, with screens managed by mid-air sensors or perhaps by voice.

That only kinda sorta played out, as touchscreen companies did just fine through the pandemic. Staffing shortages and a desire to minimize staff to customer contacts led to widespread adoption of self-service screens used to order food and buy tickets.

But a German company that specializes in touchless technology suggests while consumers will use touchscreens to specifically get and do things in faster and easier ways, situations in which the screens are more about experience and discovery are going touch-free. Ameria argues that when a screen experience is opt-in, consumers are happier if they don't have to touch the screen - for health safety reasons and also because of the age-old worry about the cleanliness of the people who used the screen before them.

Based in Heidelberg but selling globally, Ameria is focused on the software that create, enables and delivers touch-free experiences using optical sensors. I had an interesting chat with Johannes Troger, who runs business development for the company.

 

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TRANSCRIPT

Johannes, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Ameria is all about? 

Johannes Troger: Yes, thank you, Dave, for having me, and sure, I can give you a little rundown. So Ameria is originally a software company coming from software project development, and a few years back, we went into the brick and mortar retail space providing interactive solutions. We are all about bringing a great experience to the customer, and started providing a lot of touch free or touchless solutions to customers. 

So this is one of the things we are doing, and we are also providing a cloud platform behind that to manage all the solutions, to bring out the contents and to collect the data.

And you're based in Heidelberg, Germany? 

Johannes Troger: That is correct. We're based in Heidelberg, Germany. We're founded here a few years back, actually by a couple of students from Heidelberg University who met there and found that there was a big market for software development, and yeah, that's how it got started, and then after a few changes, we arrived at where we are at now.

Are the students still involved or has it kind of evolved from there? 

Johannes Troger: So one of them is. He’s our CEO, and the other one left a few years back, but one of the founders is still heading the company and is still our visionary behind everything we do.

Okay, and you're a private company, but you have outside investment?

Johannes Troger: Yes, we are a private company. It's still mainly owned by the founder and his family, but we have some outside investors. So the biggest part actually goes to a crowd investing group. It's a German platform called Companisto and we did a few rounds with them, which was a really great way for us to do it because it allowed a lot of people who also come from the industry to invest, and they didn't have to go in with large amounts but they really became our marketing and PR crowd and then we have a few larger investors also involved, but it's mainly in a family office space. 

And what's your role with the company? 

Johannes Troger: So I'm really heading the business development and partner development part of the business, so on the one hand, I'm a lot out there. Now again, out there at trade fairs and conventions and so on, talking to potential customers, also working with a lot of our partners and also still have some accounts which I started developing when I started at the company, and where I'm still involved in projects, which is always really good because from once in a while to see what's actually happening out there, that's reall

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.

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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 man

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The prevailing impression of Google and digital signage is that the tech giant came briefly into the sector a few years ago, made some noise, and then quietly left. But the reality is that the tech giant has continued to be active in digital signage, and there are numerous screen  networks out there running on Chrome OS devices through different CMS software vendors.

Then there's Android, the Google-developed operating system used on a pile of smart displays and separate play-out boxes.

But now Google is again getting visibly active in the digital signage and related kiosk ecosystem, extending an existing program called Chrome Enterprise Recommended to software vendors who use Chrome OS. It's also introduced a Chrome OS device management license,  for narrow-purpose uses like screens and kiosks, that works out to just a touch more than a couple of bucks a month. And there's Flex, an application that can extend the life of a Windows box by running Chrome, and enable screen networks using a blend of playback hardware.

I think a lot of the early interest in Google, back in 2015, was with the relatively low prices of the software and hardware. These days, it likely has more to do with scale, manageability and security.

I spoke with Naveen Viswanatha, Google's product lead on Chrome OS.

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TRANSCRIPT

Naveen, thank you for joining me. What's your role at Google? 

Naveen Viswanatha: Hey, thanks for having me. I am the Chrome OS Product Lead for our solution areas and our solution areas include virtualization, contact center, and very recently we've beefed up our kiosk and digital signage solution area. 

Are you at the main campus out in Silicon Valley? 

Naveen Viswanatha: I am, indeed. Yeah, right here in the heart of the main campus in Mountain View.

How long have you been with Google?

Naveen Viswanatha: I have been with Google for 16 years but I haven't been spending the whole time in Chrome OS. I've been using Chrome OS for about 7 years, I believe.

So you're almost a lifer in Google terms? 

Naveen Viswanatha: I guess so, it seems like that. 

I'm gonna talk about Chrome OS. Can you give me a sense of the installed base globally for Chrome OS? I don't need like today's number, but just like … it's many millions, right? 

Naveen Viswanatha: Yeah. We don't break out specific details, but yeah it's in the millions and that kind of spans, I would say across three broad areas. Education is one area. So students and student Chromebooks and boxes. Consumer, and then Enterprise and, within Enterprise, that's where my focus is in the solution space. So yeah, that's how we look at the overall market, but yeah it's seen a tremendous amount of growth, especially in the last several years.

Yeah, the pandemic really put a push on Chrome for Education, right? 

Naveen Viswanatha: It did. I would actually say that it increased an already healthy appetite for Chrome devices within the education space. I actually used to be part of the education team, and we went from devices that were primarily purchased by schools and districts to devices that were now starting to see adoption in the home and that was the kind of recent trend that we saw over the course of the pandemic is really devices being used in the home, remote for delivery of curriculum. 

Would that be driven in part by just the simple fact that the kids are learning at home now, and the parents are seeing the Chromebooks and thinking, okay these are perfectly workable laptops?

Naveen Viswanatha: That's entirely right, and in addition to that, some of the unique capabilities allow students to use their education profiles. So the same profile that they use on their Chromebooks at school, they can log into a personal Chromebook at home and all of their data, all of their bookmarks, their applications, everything is synced to them pretty uniquely.

And so, that abil

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Screenfeed has, for many years, been one of the primary players in subscription content for digital signage - offering great-looking, fully-automated infotainment feeds that help populate the schedules of screens and get viewers looking again and again.

Now the Minneapolis company is introducing a new service that's a direct play on the no code software movement. Screenfeed Connect is an online toolset that allows users - whether they have developer chops or not - to easily and quickly integrate data sources into fully customizable HTML5 designs and layouts.

The product of two years and 30,000 developer hours, Connect grew out of the frustration of custom content project pitches going nowhere because the clients didn't have the budget. Screenfeed, for example, might need to charge $7,000 to reflect the time needed to develop a finished, automated template, but the client might have a budget for $700.

By putting Connect together, Screenfeed now has a platform that plays to the whole notion of economies of scale. So maybe that $7,000 job could be done for around $700.

I spoke with Screenfeed founder Jeremy Gavin about the roots of Connect, and how it will be available to see and try out this week on the show floor at InfoComm.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jeremy, thank you for joining me for those who don't know what Screenfeed is all about, and I can't imagine there's a lot of those, but nonetheless give me the skinny on what your company does and how long you've been around?

Jeremy Gavin: Yeah. Thanks for having me, and happy to share what Screenfeed is up to.

We started as a service. I started the company in 1999, I believe. We really didn't transition to what is now Screenfeed until 2008. So we've been doing this for Screenfeed, which typically has been known as the provider of infotainment content or data feeds. Like we call it dynamic rich content, that's ready-made. It's been a lot of fun building that. We serve content to over 175,000 screens around the globe, and all types of CMS and on many different types of digital signage networks. So it's been fun to see the industry grow over the last 14 years because we've been involved in a lot of people's networks, making sure everything under the network is running and that the screens are working. We just get to provide them great content that feeds their screens, keeps them fresh, and the purpose to use our content is really, in most cases, it is to get people to watch the screen longer or get them to turn their head and look at it in the first place.

You may have some messages, it could be employee messages, it could be advertisements that you want people to see on the screen, that's maybe the purpose of the screen. But in an exchange you might want to provide them something like news or weather or sports scores to gain their attention, and in some cases, it is to inform them whether it's alerts, weather alerts or traffic. There is some utility to the content that we provide, as well.

And you guys have done some research that kind of validates the whole idea of injecting things like infotainment into schedules that would otherwise just be a series of promotional messages or workplace messages or whatever it may be, that actually does have a positive impact that it does get people to keep looking and remember the next thing that comes up on the screen, right?

Jeremy Gavin: Yeah, absolutely. Certainly when we started we were going off of a gut feeling that, Hey, we should put something on the screens. And truth be told, a lot of our customers probably have said that we need to check a content box. So what can we get that is easy and updates to my screens.

So it's not the same all the time. So you'll get some use from that, just to say, let's just keep our screen updated with something new. But fortunately, we've had opportunities to work with customers who wan

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

One of the best things about projection mapping technology is its ability to completely fill a big space with immersive visuals. The resulting experiences can be good enough to become paid attractions.

There are now dedicated, ticketed venues devoted to immersive, projection-mapped experiences around the world, and one of the best is Oasis Immersion, a venue in downtown Montreal that was dreamed up by a guy who'll be very familiar to the digital signage community - Denys Lavigne.

He started and ran Arsenal Media for many years - building up a creative shop that most years would all but sweep the digital signage awards programs it entered. Arsenal was ultimately acquired by the display technology firm Christie, and Lavigne continued working for them for about four years, before deciding to step away and chase a new dream.

That's been a real journey. I had lunch with him years ago, in New York, when he laid out the rough concept for me. I did a walk-through of the venue back in 2019, when it was just a set of darkened rooms, months off from opening. Then COVID hit, and the launch plans were derailed by lockdowns. The concept and business clawed its way through the pandemic, and Oasis is open and thriving with experiences designed to both amaze and inspire.

I had a terrific catch-up chat recently with Denys.

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TRANSCRIPT

Denys, can you tell me what Oasis is all about? 

Denys Lavigne: Oasis Immersion is an immersive destination that was launched on February 25th, 2021 in Montreal. It's within the Montreal convention center, and it's really part of this new trend of immersion as a destination, similar to places like the Cathédrale in Paris, the Team Lab project in Tokyo have actually quite a few. So it's really based on projection and audio, it's a 25,000 square foot space structured in three galleries. There's a cafe bar, there's a boutique and there are two additional experiential areas. So I'm really proud of this project.

And this is right in the heart of Montreal, right?

Denys Lavigne: Right in the heart of Montreal, the Montreal convention center is located between the old Montreal area and the cultural district and the business district. So it's within an area called the international district which bridges to many strategic areas within the city.

And this is, if I'm remembering correctly, because I've walked through this space with you, it was an old loading dock or something for the convention center? 

Denys Lavigne: It was actually before a bus station, and it was transformed into a potential future exhibit area but the project never really came through so it was actually used as just a storage facility, and because of its location within the convention center, it wasn't necessarily easy to use as a rental space, because most of the other areas' rental rooms and conference space are on the upper floors. So it became a no man's land, and when I was made aware that this area was just sitting there, I thought this could be a great place for this project. I had the immersive destination project in mind for a while, and this was the perfect timing and the perfect location to do it. 

Yeah, you're right across from some pretty good hotels and not far away from some other ones and obviously it's a convention center, so there's a ton of people flowing through there. It's on a subway line on and on. So it seems kind of perfect. 

Denys Lavigne: Absolutely. For us, the location in terms of the site itself was really important, and the other interesting aspect about the location, it helps us to diversify the business model around the project. So we do have, of course a more B2C angle with the immersive exhibits that we present to the audience, but we also have a B2B angle where the space can be privatized for different type of events and used as a another option in terms of the rental for spaces so it w