Thoughts on DSE 2013 from Jeff Porter www.porterdigitalsignage.com
It feels like
the show is bigger this year. Perhaps it's just as you walk in the booths that
the display guys set up a huge. Maybe this is a real industry after all! Only
took 10 years!
Samsung launched their Smart Platform. Samsung
had always lead the pack in making integrated smart screens, which previously
had been PC based. But of course PCs can be expensive. Leveraging technology
from smart phones for digital signage is a good thing. Open APIs that multiple
vendors can support (instead of Magic Info) is a good thing. Not using an
android based non proprietary OS is a bad thing however. So they could have
borrowed a little more from the galaxy S III. Software has not been Samsung's
strength however...so I worry that the stability and integrity of the solution
will be a software finger pointing nightmare. I have a simple motto....Players
Must Play. Time will tell if they have added enough quality software and
features to ensure that the Players Will Play.
Everyone seems
to be displaying transparent LCD. Clearly a cool thing. And not just because
it's on the front of a refrigerator door. But this technology is probably doomed
to be very expensive since it cannot leverage the volume of consumer LCD panels
being made by the droves. Still very cool.
In software the
usual players are there with updated GUIs, mobile enabled apps, android players,
Support for the latest cute hardware devices, HTML5 which someday will replace
Flash as the preferred format for dynamic content....but its still early to
claim that flash is dead. All good progress though.
Intel was
showing off their typical bevy of high end apps. Always fun eye candy. An IT
vending machine in your fortune 500 company break room. Cool idea. I could have
used that yesterday morning. I brought the wrong USB charging cable for my
phone. Rookie mistake. Fortunately, there's a nice big Fry's down near the
airport. $1.99 later I'm charging my phone. But a usb cable vending machine in
the hotel lobby would have been nice! I'm not sure I need a life size picture of
a refrigerator in a home depot when i can reach out and touch the real thing
however. They get the award for the most expensive mini shelf edge signage for a
retail shop that is driven by a core i7!!! BTW... I need a Fry's in
Philadelphia!
Chris Gibbs, who runs the DSE stated that 72% of
attendees this year had not attended the show last year. That's a pretty
shocking stat, but I figured it out! It not that there are 72% new attendees,
but 72% of us have new email addresses this year! Ha! Jeff Porter...a newbie? I
think not.
Great parties from Samsung and Peerless partners
the first night. Thanks guys, but I already ran out of business cards on day one. I
guess that's a good thing. Most people were in shocked that after 18 years at
Scala that I'm now a free agent! Ten minutes later at the local Kinkos and I've got 100 new glossy full color business cards. Gotta love that. Looking forward to day 2!
Day2... I had a chance to check out things that I was never able to check out since I was working at Scala...ie: the competition!
ComQi: They've come a LONG LONG way since the simplistic playlists of yester year. Fairly modern GUI and an engaging mobile app called Passport (hosted by them...everything they do is saaS) to engage via a QR code on a person's mobile phone...they had a multiple choice quiz as an example. Reseller unfriendly (they sell direct most of the time).
Navori: Really nice GUI there. Pretty simple to understand. No clutter from popups and most of the time self hosted (not saas). Cool new little player about 2"x6"x1" !!! Probably Android but didn't say. In additional to their traditional PC based players. Reseller friendly.
Broadsign: Introduced a cute new little Android box. All the same functionality of PC Win/Linux players. SaaS only as usual. No demos of the product on site. Gonna go check that out. Supposedly best suited for ad based networks. Not very reseller friendly (as most SaaS guys are).
BrightSign: New generation of media appliances including ones that deal with copy protected HDMI input or Coax input, and give overlay or L-bar treatment of that HD video. That's nice. I'd like to see more of their boxes in a connected network application. Perhaps this new live encrypted video input/overlay/squeeze will drive that adoption.
SignageLive: No booth, just sharing a bit of space in Samsung's booth for their new "platform".
I need to get a demo of their stuff. Probably closely related to SignChannel but reseller oriented. That's mystifying since SignChannel was definitely not reseller friendly. (low margin)
Cisco and Nexus On Demand's AppSpace: They get the most improved trophy. New Cisco HW is actually not terrible (mid-western compliment) and the Nexus GUI seems pretty powerful. So it could be a new formidable competitor. Reseller friendly.
Fourwinds: Nothing really new showing. Reseller unfriendly since they sell so much direct, but they have appointed a new guy to try and court the reseller channel. Good luck with that.
Didn't have time to spend much time with Symon (although I did speak with Charles Ansley). Symon is pretty reseller unfriendly since they sell direct most of the time.
Ditto on Harris, but did speak with Carre Dawson. Dust still settling on their spinoff.
Capital Networks: A new android player. Showing off an integrated screen from Viewsonic.
Coolest new thing: SonicPing (www.sonicping.net) by John Kirkpatrick -- think of Shazam-like service integrated with PayPal-like service for retail. Emitters (high frequency speakers) in retail (drives dogs nuts, but humans can't hear it) send out bleeps that your smart phone hears and responds to when you get close (and stop). Allows you to complete the instore transaction right then and there. Seems cool if they can piggy back the app on something else so that to the nearest whole number, there will X million apps installed.
Great show all around. Played golf on Friday AM. Sunny and 70's. Shot an 89. Yeah.
Jeff Porter. www.porterdigitalsignage.com
