Multi-touch is cool, but …

I bumped into yet another post and accompanying video about multi-touch touch screen applications that allow users to manipulate things on a screen without a mouse or keyboard.

Yet again, it’s all very cool to look at and if you have happy feet, the video like all the others has some slightly-dated techno track thumping away as the demo guy wiggles and squiggles things with his hands.

From what I read people are very excited about this as an application, and some writers are suggesting this is where public, interactive screens are headed.

Well … maybe.

But will someone please include something useful in one of these demos! The commercial possibilities for digital finger-painting are pretty much limited to the under 6 crowd, and even they’d rather use the real stuff so they can splatter their clothes and everything else in a three-block radius.

The stretching and shrinking pictures thing is nice, but to what end? Same with the zooming in and out of Google satellite imagery.

Now, if there is one of these things at a subway station and I’m there, in an unfamiliar city, standing there desperately trying to locate a bar that serves Harp on tap, and I can use this sort of thing to sort through bars, tell me where I am and what train to take and when to get off, and send me the address to my cellphone, then we’re talking.

Enough of the finger-painting, guys. Get a Flash design partner to do up a quick and dirty interface, and show something useful. THEN you’ll get some real interest, and maybe some business. Granted, the people promoting these things are often just students or developers doing side projects, but I’d be surprised if many of them don’t have designs on making money off their work.

The Microsoft Surface thing may be limited because it is a table, uses DLP projection and costs as much as a Hyundai, but at least they had the smarts (and albeit lotsa money) to hit the marketplace with something that had commercial use.

CODA’s next breakfast club meeting on content

The Canadian Out-of-home Digital Association started a breakfast series recently aimed at educating members and also drawing in new potential members.

The date, location and subject of the next one has been announced.

The good news is it is in downtown and accessible by means other than 10-kmh freeways at rush hour.

Details:

The Future of Content: Content and Programming

Date: Thursday, June 5th

Location: 483 Bay St. North Tower

Time: 8:00-10:00am

Speakers:

• Neil Sweeney - CanWest Media
• Denys Lavigne - Arsenal Media (from Montreal, founder of the JADN series up there)
• Paul Leblanc - CEO and Founder of Extreme Group

The deal is that members can bring someone else with them. It’s not open to people who just want to drop by.

Mobile ad CPMs well above those for DS marketplace

Mobile advertising is a very different kettle of fish than digital screens, but there are things to be learned from what’s happening in that space.

MediaBuyerPlanner had a piece Friday reporting a few things of note that spilled out of a mobile advertising conference in LA.

1 - CPMs - A Verizon exec said the cost per thousand being sought these days for mobile ads is $20-$30 because of the high level of engagement mobile offers to advertisers, though it was felt $20 is more realistic. In our world, CPMs are more like $5-$10 with places offering long dwell times able to at least ask with a straight face for more.

2 - Penetration - In the US, market penetration for SMS advertising is still far below that of Europe, but the response rate is more twice as high (you wonder if that’s because it is still a novelty over here and the SMS spam factor is not yet in play).

3 - Budget - U.S. mobile ad spending is projected to reach nearly $1.7 billion in 2008, up some 89 percent from $878 million in 2007, and will surpass $6.5 billion in 2012.

As noted, mobile and digital screens are two different animals. But the advertising world is looking to make media buys across platforms, and the smart among us will be doing what they can to ensure money that is shifting to mobile can also be used for complementary buys on campaigns that intertwine big and small screens.

The industry cull is underway

I have been hearing lots of stories lately about networks in Canada and the US huffing and wheezing away as they try to generate the sort of ad revenues needed to move forward.

UK and European blogs have also been reporting lately of the business failures of Big Media Group in England, Digital Poster in Norway and a couple of long-running networks in France.

It’s hard to say if these struggles reflect the current business climate, or just the inevitability of the business plans these companies were working off.

The ad dollars shifting to this industry are real, but the people making decisions on where to spend that money have a LOT of choices. This is not like a birthday party where the media planner mom makes sure everyone gets a thin little slice of the cake. More likely, a couple of the kids will each get half and everyone else fights over the crumbs.

It’s nowhere near enough to simply BE in an environment with a screen or screens, though that seems to be the primary business objective of some networks. There’s a whole formula to getting that right that starts with a really well-considered strategy and never, really, ends. The screens have to steadily be supported with fresh content, and both the advertisers and venue partners with great service.

I spend much of my time talking to people who are just getting into this space, listening politely to the bravado and the hyper-ambitious plans. In presentations I’ve been doing lately, I talk about 1,000 still being the number most people trot out. But instead of planning in terms of 1,000 total screens or venues, it’s 1,000 a quarter in a rollout, or 1,000 a year for the next three years.

Some of these companies have the horsepower and brainpower to make that actually happen.  But a lot don’t, and the target numbers are just thrown out there. One of my favorite companies to work with right now has plans to do, I think, something like 600 sites.

NOBODY throws out 600 as a number unless they’ve actually stopped and thought it all through, and landed on that number as being realistic.

To borrow a phrase from an industry friend, who borrowed it from M. Night Shyamalan, “I see dead people.”

There’s a lot of networks out there right now that aren’t going to make it, and others just ready to roll that have a sort of living dead whiff to them.

Many, many good things are happening in this industry, and there are, increasingly, efforts that can be referenced and celebrated, but there’s also a lot of stuff that just doesn’t work well enough to be sustained. The industry is starting to go through a cull, and while those carcasses laying about here and there (or more accurately hanging blank from ceilings in stores and public spaces) will be problematic for a while, it’s needed.

People like me, who spend too much time thinking about and looking at this space, should not have to stop and think when someone asks them about networks or installations that were truly impressive and effective. But that’s kinda where we’re at right now.

Adcentricity makes US foray official; opens office in Manhattan

Adcentricity founder Rob Gorrie has been spending most of his time in New York for at least a couple of months now, but his company made it official this week by announcing the opening of its NYC office.

“The new office will allow us to spend more ongoing, quality time and effort with our network, integrator and research partners, while boosting service and support to the agency and advertiser community.” said Rob Gorrie, President of ADCENTRICITY.  “We have seen significant growth and interest in our services and solutions in New York and have expanded our resources to accommodate that need”.

The new office is located at:
ADCENTRICITY, Inc
145 West 45th Street, Suite 701
New York, New York 10036
Media Sales: William Nye 1.866.611.3664 x 107

In addition to the New York office opening, ADCENTRICITY has expanded its New York sales force significantly, announcing seven new senior sales executives have been added to the company’s ranks in New York.

The lead guy in New York is media sales veteran Bill Nye, who gets the science guy comment about 20 times an hour.

Press release here.

Accenture study looks at shift to ubiquitous media

Consulting monster Accenture has a a new report out about the future of content strategy, and the evolution from conventional media to a digital media world where content is somewhat ubiquitous.

There’s a PDF that can be downloaded that runs through the thinking, which focuses very much on online advertising and the impacts of things like social networking and mobile. But it also gives direction on what the advertising industry is thinking right now, and where they see budgets going.

What I found interesting and appropriate to our little corner of the industry was the conclusion, and somewhat cautionary words.

Across the entire media and entertainment industry, traditional ways of doing business are being challenged by new digital technologies and consumer demands for 24/7 access to high quality content. This does not mean that traditional content (and traditional media) is dead. Far from it. Cinemas will continue to find audiences for years to come. Children will still lose themselves in storybooks. Newspapers will be spread out on café tables. And bands will treasure the first cut of their new record.

But there’s no denying the pace of change. A generation from now, people will rely on media and information much more than they do today. Crossplatform access to content – anytime, anyplace, anywhere – will be the norm. New technologies will emerge and be adopted. Disruptive players will force their way into the media and entertainment industry.

For the time being, however, “old” and “new” media will ride side-by-side. Each will fuel interest in the other. Digital will continue to enhance the consumer experience, enabling wider and more immediate distribution. All of this is well recognized by now.

All industries eventually arrive at an inflexion point. The financial services industry had no choice but to embrace electronic trading. The travel industry was forced to accept its consumers shopping online for the best deals. The telecommunications industry had to come to terms with VoIP.

Now the media and entertainment industry has reached this point. Companies in this sector know what they must do. And, as ever, there will be no prizes for second place.

A different spin on hospital screens

There are any number of companies putting screens in hospital clinic waiting areas, as revenue generating  plays, and other institutions putting screens in as digital donor walls and wayfinding.

But an LA area hospital is the first I’ve bumped into that is using DS software to help streamline hospital operations.

At St. Joseph Hospital in Orange County, patient and operative status is pulled out of the patient management system and displayed real-time on 14 large-format LCD monitors located around the operating floor, from pre-operative to surgery to the post-operative care unit.

Presumably this replaces the marker boards that hospitals use to track patient care - at least on the TV show ER, which very happily is my only real frame of reference.

The hospital uses Toronto-based Omnivex, whose strong suit has for years been its automated data display capability.

By pulling information from the primary patient database, says a press release, Omnivex software allows doctors, nurses and administrators to quickly see any changes in patient status, operating room availability and more. This capability reduces errors, while improving overall efficiency.

Ingram Micro starts tech fair tour in Great White North

The first of three digital signage technology days that Ingram Micro is running around the country this month went off in Toronto yesterday, with maybe 100 people or so taking in a bunch of show and tells with vendors, and then moving around a micro trade show.

There is another one next week in Vancouver, and the following week in Montreal.

I was among the speakers allowed to spout nonsense and tell my captors about my masters shiny pots and pans. Among the others: Alchemy, Samsung, eK3, Ergotron and ICG. Ingram did this last fall, with the idea of educating resellers and people coming into the space.

Among the stuff that was interesting to me - Samsung is rolling out a new LCD panel that has just an 11 mm bezel, which for you non-metric Luddites is maybe a 7/16s of an inch and means tiling a few of these together in a videoi wall doesn’t look butt-ugly, like it does with conventional, much wider bezels.

They are also releasing commercial panels that come in somewhat sexier high-gloss piano black finish, and ones that have TV tuners and speakers, something normally the domain of consumer grade displays.

EK3 announced some sort of digital signage in a box thingdoodle aimed at the small to medium business market, but I had to be somewhere else in the building as that went on. It’s an interesting move, as the London, Ontario-based company is more known for chasing big enterprise accounts.

The fair was my first chance to hear about Internet Connectivity Group, or ICG, which has been doing the trade show circuit making noise about a solution that combine mobile broadband connectivity and audio/video over the wireless spectrum to get digital signage into locations.

The premise is 3G/4G mobile broadband is now well established in North America and the rates are at a point where it is an affordable and hassle-lite alternative (when compared to the well-documented horrors of working with phone companies to get DSL in) for getting high speed in place for new networks.

There is then a box on site that sends the signal output from the media player engine around to screens using audio/video over wireless, with ICG saying 1080P is good to a radius of 150 feet and 720P to 200 feet.

Now, this is in perfect conditions and just like wireless networking, actual performance depends a lot of environmental conditions. They had a demo running, which looked fine, but the real test is seeing this stuff working in public deployments with lots of walls and fixtures and metal and other wireless things happening in the building. If it’s solid, touchdown. If it’s shaky or intermittent, it’s a no-go.

The box that runs all this has a PC, WiFi router and wireless AV transmitters all built in. The signal is received by what they call ViFi Adapters. The notion is that PC in this unit has the horsepower to also run  a third-party DS playout software application.

The box is a big mother, which would leave me a little concerned when it comes to deploying in retail - where space is often limited and perilous. But if that’s not a biggie, this is an interesting alternative for companies looking to deploy rapidly, knowing cable and DSL broadband are not good options. Data plans in the US are low enough that this sort of thing can compare favorably with more conventional broadband.

Not really so in Canada, however, where the people who sell data plans have eyepatches and parrots on their shoulders, and say “Arrrr!” a lot.

ICG COO Gordon Davidson, when asked about the challenge of trying to build business in Canada, said he was negotiating a deal with one carrier up here that would see unlimited for about $120 a month.

Now for anyone here in the tundra who has had their wireless bills delivered by forklift, $120 doesn’t sound too bad in relative terms. It is still more than DSL, cable or Wimax, but not crazily so.

But compare this to the US, where Sprint will sell you unlimited for $50.  THAT’S the price point at which mobile broadband gets really attractive, but whether Canada’s wireless carriers will ever see fit to get near those rates is a big open question.

Linux guy sought by BroadSign

My guys up the road in Montreal are looking for someone with Linux expertise to join the Solutions team.

This is the post on Montreal Tech Watch:

Company: BroadSign

Position: Operating System Specialist

Responsibilites and Tasks: BroadSign International is a Montreal-based rapidly growing digital signage software-as-a-service provider that is looking for an technology enthusiast to architect, build and maintain what we are
calling the BOSS (BroadSign Operating System Service). The BOSS is a remotely upgradeable bare-bones version of Ubuntu 7.10 that is custom tailored to meet a client’s embedded application requirements.

Required Knowledge:

The BroadSign Operating System Specialist should eat-breathe-and-sleep Linux, Windows, PC hardware. A background in open source and free software development and advocacy is a bonus.

Additional info:

As the company is growing at a rapid pace, the opportunities for growth within the Solution department and the company as a whole are unique. If you are a driven individual with a technical background, don’t miss this opportunity to join our outstanding team.

Contact :

To apply for this position, please submit your resume by email to

hr@broadsign.com

The gig is Montreal-based so your exposure to me would be mercifully limited.

Fasten your seatbelts, you’re in for a wild press release read

It has been a while since someone was out with a press release that whipped air into a big frothy pile of not very much.

But the Inbox this morning had this from TriOc Vision Studios of Montreal.

It takes a lot to stop them dead in their tracks in Las Vegas.

Finally, somebody has. TriOc Vision Studios - Canada’s premier total service studio in the domain of end-to-end 2D & 3D digital signage solutions - has blown them away. TriOc’s team of proven professionals and innovators has aced the consumer captivation market. So, if you don’t gamble when it comes to powerful marketing techniques, read on. “

We’re taking our queue (NOTE: he MUST mean cue) from marketing and trade show professionals, training coordinators - anyone who basically needs to capture the attention of their audience and keep it. The enigma of getting the consumer’s undivided attention has always plagued these professionals and now they are looking to think outside the box. TriOc’s goal is to ensure that they stop consumers dead in their tracks. Our concept is simple - We sell consumer captivation using proprietary hi-impact digital display and complete signage platforms,” said Joey Vaccaro, President and Founder, TriOc Vision Studios.

Sounds… AMAZING!!!!!

I wasn’t sure what it was, but I was ready to buy 10!!!!

Turns out, what’s up is the company is doing those goofy (my opinion only) 3D LCD things and one of the retailer at the Forum Shops in Caesars has one of the screens in there promoting a high-end timepiece. So as opposed to a revolutionary advance that has all of Las Vegas talking, we have an integrator who’s got a nice little reference installation in a high profile location.

In my old newspaper editor days, we called that “torquing” a story.