Archive for the ‘Technonlogy’ Category

Posted on October 30, 2009 - by Nate

Data Multicasting: A VERY Brief Overview

I’ve been reading some techie docs lately on the power of data multicasting. Yes, I know it sounds incredibly boring, but it’s a valuable asset to have in the digital signage industry. In fact, there are only a handful of companies within digital signage that currently specialize in data multicast technology. To remain competitive, some will require adaptation and continuous engineering going forward. Many customers are asking for it, hence the education.

What is Data Multicasting?

Multicasting involves a one-to-many or many-to-many relationship and allows for increases in efficiency in use of network resources when it comes to packet distribution. Multicasting can use the following protocols: MOSPF, CBT, IGMP, PIM-DM, PIM-SM, and BGMP.

Multicasting can be used in the following applications:

• Network Configuration
• Content Distribution
• Shared Apps:
• Information Distribution
• Multipoint Distribution: which includes, but is not limited to anycasting, unitcasting, and broadcasting.

Posted on May 14, 2009 - by Nate

Recrudescent Blog Post: Touchscreen Sign at a Bus Shelter

I picked this up from Operand.com and thought it would be worth a post here, partly because it has been a really long time since I’ve posted to my personal blog. A captive audience at a bus shelter, complete with a touchscreen sign, there is no better way to have an LCD advertising screen. 

Posted on March 7, 2009 - by Nate

“Why We Buy” Part II

I’ve been meaning to get back to this: Paco Underhill’s quotes from “Why We Buy,” Part II. 

“In other words, stores, banks, restaurants and other such spaces must be friendly to the specificaitons of the human animal.” pg. 43

“Yet a huge part of what we do is uncover ways in which retail environments fail to recognize and accommodate how human machines are built and how our anatomical and physiological aspects determine what we do.” pg. 43

“We would rather look at people than objects.” pg. 44. This could apply succinctly to digital signage content creation. 

“Amenability and profitability are totally an inextricably linked. Take care of the former, in all its guises, and the latter is assured.” pg. 44

“If there is a display of merchandise, they’re not going to take it in. If there’s a sign, they’ll probably be moving too fast to absorb what it says.” [he was speaking of the instance when people immediately walk into any venue–which is why WalMart gave us “greeters”–he refers to it as “the transition zone”] pg. 45

In either case, store merchandisers can do two sensible things where the transition zone is concerned: They can keep from trying to accomplish anything important there, and they can take steps to keep that zone as small as possible.” pg. 47

 ”We discovered another misuse of the zone a few years ago, when we tested an interactive computerized information fixture that had been designed for Kmart by a division of IBM. It had a touch screen and a keyboard , and you’d ask it where men’s underwear was, for example, and it would give you a map of the store and maybe a coupon for T-shirts or socks. A terrific idea, executed well. It helped customers and spared the store from haivng to pay someone to stand behind a desk and tell people where boys’ sweaters were–seventy-two times a day.” pg. 48

“Placing the computers too close to the door had turned them into very expensive pieces of electronic sculpture.” pg. 48

“That teaches us something about rules–you have to either follow them or break them with gusto. Just ignoring a rule or bending it a little is usually the worst thing you can do.” pg. 49

“Allowing some space between the entrance of a store and a product gives it more time in the shopper’s eye as he or she approaches it.” pg. 50

“At trade shows, the booths just inside the door may seem most desirable, but they’re pretty bad locations” pg. 50

More to come…hopefully not in another 3 weeks like last time :) 

Posted on February 14, 2009 - by Nate

“Why We Buy” Part 1

I’ve been meaning to start placing my favorite quotes from Paco Underhill’s “Why We Buy” but have not had the time. This is the first in a several part series. Enjoy:

“We can tell you how many males who take jeans into the fitting room will buy them compared to how many females (65 percent to 25 percent).” pg. 17

“The butt-brush factor, we wurmised, was why that rack was an underperformer.” pg. 18

“Shoppers have been spooked by too-close quarters.” pg. 18

“Move the treats to where kids and little old ladies can reach them.” pg. 19

“Much of the signage was misplaced–common sense dictated that it be positioned to face the main entrance of the store, but we found that most jeans shoppers came upon the section from a completely different direction.” pg. 20

“My old colleagues in the world of academia regard what we do with envy and horror–envy because we get to do what we do and get paid for it, horror because we actually stick our necks out and are held accountable for the success or failure of our suggestions.” pg. 21

“Why not take the tools of the urban anthropologist and use them to study how people interact with the retail environment?” pg. 24

“To my surprise things that seemed logical and obvious to me were delightful insights to my clients. It was clear that I had stepped into a world of business where what I did had value, but I knew nothing of the consequences or, really the context.” pg. 27

“…the view from the register back into the body of the store is distinctly myopic.” pg. 28

“A store has more than one constituency, and it must therefore perform several functions, all from the same premises.” pg. 29

“If we went into stores only when we needed to buy something, and if once there we bought only what we needed, the economy would collapse, boom.” pg. 31

“…we are now generously overretailed–too much is for sale, through too many outlets. The economy even at its strongest can’t keep up with retailing’s growth. Judging from birthrates, we are generating stores considerably faster than we are producing new baby shoppers. Retailers are not opening stores in the United States to serve new markets anymore. They are opening stores to try to steal someone else’s customers. As the competition gets heated, there is a need for an edge–a science, if you will.” pg. 31

“The standard tools of marketing work, they just don’t work anywhere near as well as they used to. Many purchasing decisions are made, or can be heavily influenced, on the floor of the store itself. Shoppers are susceptible to impressions and information they acquire in stores, rather than just relying on brand-name loyalty or advertising to tell them what to buy. As a result, an important medium for transmitting messages and closing sales is now the store and the aisle. That building, that place, has become a great big three-dimensional advertisement for itself. Signage, shelf position, display space and special fixtures all make it either likelier or less likely that a shopper will buy a particular item (or any item at all).” pg. 32

“Finally, our studies prove that the longer a shopper remains in a store, the more he or she will buy. And the amount of time a shopper spends in a store depends on how comfortable and enjoyable the experience is.” pg. 33

“Marketing, advertising, promotion and location can bring shoppers in, but then it’s the job of the merchandise, the employees and the store itself to turn them into buyers. Conversion rate measures what you make of what you have–it shows how well (or how poorly) the entire enterprise is functioning where it counts most: in the store. Conversion rate is to retail what batting average is to baseball–without knowing it, you can say that somebody had a hundred hits last season, but if you don’t know whether he had three hundred at-bats or a thousand. Without conversion rate, you don’t know if you’re Mickey Mantle or Mickey Mouse.” pg. 36

“The average shopper spent two minutes in the cosmetics section. The average shopper who bought something spent only thirty seconds more. Now, the amount of time a shopper spends in a store (assuming he or she is shopping, not waiting in a line) is perhaps the single most important factor in determinging how much she or he will buy. Over and over again, our studies have shown a direct relationship. If the customer is walking through the entire store (or most of it, at least) and is considering lots of merchandise (meaning he or she is looking and touching and thinking), a fair amount of time is required…” pg. 37

“Here’s another good way to judge a store: by its interception rate, meaning the percentage of customers who have some contact with an employee…All our research shows this direct relationship: the more shopper-employe contacts that take place, the greater the average sale. Talking with an employee has a way of drawing a cusotmer in closer.” pg. 37

“Here’s a finaly measure, a real simple one waiting time. This, as we discuss elsewhere, is the single most important factor in customer satisfaction. But few retailers realize that when shoppers are made to wait too long in line (or anywhere else), their impression of overall service plunges.” pg. 38

“This finaly matter doesn’t involve any particular way to measure a store, but it’s a remarkable example of businessperson ignorance: they often don’t really know who their shoppers are.” pg. 39

“Smart retailers would reward employees who learned a little Japanese, German, French or Spanish–even just a handful of phrases would make a difference, as anyone who has shopped in a foreign country would realize. Restaurants should have menus in Japanese and German on hand.” pg. 39 ( I might ad, what about the digital signage?).

stay tuned for more coming up….

Posted on January 30, 2009 - by Nate

DigitalSignage.com Finally Goes Live w/UGC Aggregation Tool

DigitalSignage.com Releases User Generated News Aggregation Tool for Digital Sign Industry

In an effort to bring industry articles, blogs, news, and information into one place, DigitalSignage.com has created a custom news aggregation site for the digital signage industry.  Interested Digital Signage users and consumers alike can now submit news stories, comment on recent articles, and suggest interesting and relevant information be posted to the news feed.

“The site’s software seamlessly aggregates multiple feeds which are managed, filtered, and approved by an administrator,” said Nate Nead, company President. “In addition, users can submit industry stories, news, whitepapers and articles they have discovered from across the web. Essentially, the site is similar to Digg or Slashdot, but with a narrow focus on the digital signage industry.”

Registered users are able to submit their own press releases, unique stories, news, and industry insights as well as provide commentary on articles and other user postings within the site.  In this way, DigitalSignage.com aims to educate readers and facilitate greater discussion for the emerging digital signage industry.

The release of DigitalSignage.com also comes complete with a digital signage industry glossary, directory, blog, and a guest article feed. The new directory contains complete information for approximately 2,000 industry leading businesses which provide services and products for digital signage consumers. Also contained in the site’s features are two article feeds where digital signage leaders can share their insights as the industry continues to evolve. 

Posted on January 2, 2009 - by Nate

Crossing the Chasm: Book Review

I recently finished (for the second time) Geoffrey Moore’s book entitled “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers.” What a great book. Although it was originally written in 1991 and revised in 1999 (now ten years ago), it still offers some great insight into converting sales in the high-tech and emerging markets. I’m putting some of my favorite quotes from the book in this post. You’ll will also see me quote him regularly at the digital signage blog.

“The point of greatest peril in the development of a high tech market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominately pragmatists in orientation.”

 

“If prudence rather than brilliance is to be our guiding principle, then many heads are better than one.”

“What happens more often is a desperate attempt to recreate momentum, typically through some highly visible form of promotion, which ends up making the company look like Tarzan frantically jerking back and forth trying to get a vine moving with no leverage.”  Just a caviat: This reminds me of Wireless Ronin, who is the lead sponsor of the next digital signage expo. It would seem that their bleeding company is currently acting as the frantic Tarzan…

“Each of the gaps [in the technology adoption life cycle] represents an opportunity for marketing to lose momentum, to miss the transitions to the next segment, thereby never to gain the promised land of profit-margin leadership in the middle of the bell curve.”

“The key to winning over [the pragmatist] segment is to show that the new technology enables some strategic leap forward, something never before possible, which has an intrinsic value and appeal to the nontechnologist.”

“Transitioning from the early to the late majority, has to do with demands on the end user to be technologically competent.”

“At a time of greatest peril, when the company was just entering the chasm, its leaders held high expectations rather than modest ones, and spent heavily in expansion rather than husbanding resources.”

“To reap the rewards of the mainstream market, your marketing strategy must successfully respond to all three of these stages.”

“Marketing professionals insist on market segmentation because they know no meaningful marketing program can be implemented across a set of customers who do not reference each other. The reason for this is simply leverage. No company can afford to pay for every marketing contact made. Every program must rely on some ongoing chain reaction effects–what is usually called word of mouth. The more sefl-referencing the market and the more tightly bounded its communications channels, the greater the opportunity for such effects.”

“In every case, [visionaries] took significant business risks with  what at the time was unproven technology in order to achieve breakthrough improvements in productivity and customer service. And that is the key poit. Visionaries are not looking for an improvement; they are looking for a fundamental breakthrough.”

“The key point is that, in contrast with the technology enthusiast, a visionary derives value not from a system’s technology itself but from the strategic leap forward it enables.”

“At the end, you need to be very careful in negotiations, keeping the spark of the vision alive without committing to tasks that are unachievable within the time frame allotted.”

“In terms of communications, typically you don’t find [visionaries], they find you.”

“Visionaries are the ones who give high-tech companies their first big break. It is hard to plan for them in marketing programs, but it is even harder to plan without them.”

Problem: “a company sells the visionary before they have the product.”

“It is crucial, therefore, for any long term strategic marketing plan to understnd the pragmatist buyers and to focus on winning their trust.”

“Marketing leadership is crucial, therefore, to winning pragmatist customers.”

“[Pragmatists] get measured year in and year out on what their operation has spent versus what it has returned to the corporation.”

“Overall, to market to pragmatists, you must be patient. you need to be conversant with the issues what dominate thier particular business. You need to show up at the industry-specific conferences and trade shows they attend. You need to be mentioned in articles that run in the magazines they read. You need to be mentioned in the articles that run in the magazines they read. You need to be installed in other companies in their industry. You need to have developed applications for your product that are specific to the industry. You need to have partnerships and alliances with the other vendors who serve their industry. You need to have earned a reputation for quality and service. In short, you need to make yourself over into the obvious supplier of choice.”

“It is to high tech’s inability to transition its marketing efforst effectively between the pragmatists and the conservatives that poses the greatest threat to its well-being.”

“In a sense, this is a pity because skeptics can teach us a lot about what we are doing wrong….Steamrolling over the skeptics, in other words, may be a great sales tactic, but it is a poor marketing one.”

“You must get into a mainstream market segment soon, establishing long-term relationships with pragmatist buyers, for only through these can you control your own destiny.”

“To enter the mainstream market is an act of aggression…You are an invader.”

“Focus an verabundance of support into a confined market niche.”

“Companies just starting out, as well as any marketing program operating with scarce resources must operate in tightly bound market to be competitive.”

“We do not have, nor are we willing to adopt, any discipline that would ever require us to stop pursuing any sale at any time for any reason.”

“The consequences of being sales-driven during the chasm period are, to put it simply, fatal.”

“Numerous studies have shown that in the high-tech buying process, word of mouth is the number one source of information busyers reference, both at the beginning of the sales cycle, to establich their ‘long lists,’ and at the end…”

“The key to moving beyond one’s initial target niche is to select strategic target market segments to begin with.”

“Make a total commitment to the niche, and then do your best to meet everyone else’s committment to the niche, and then do your best to meet everyone else’s needs with whatever resources you have left over.”

“The companies who failed had overdesigned for the target market because they were hedging their bets. Ironically, in the get act of trying to reduce their market risk, they actually increased it.”

“Applications are what an end user sees…Platforms, by contrast, are multi-purpose by definition…When markets go mass, platforms have the advantage.”

“You need to understand that informed intuition rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision making tool to use.”

“So the rule of thumb in crossing the chasm is simple: Pick on somebody your own size [when target marketing]”

“Create a marketplace in which your product is the only reasonable buying proposition. That starts…with targeting markets that have a compelling reason to buy your product.”

“Real techies don’t need whole products.”

Continue Reading with Crossing the Chasm Book Review part II and part III.

Posted on November 7, 2008 - by Nate

Some Criticism for Wireless Ronin

A recent statement by the former CEO of Wireless Ronin, Jeffrey Mack, threw up a red flag in my mind:

“We are pleased to be recognized by this industry leading tradeshow which shows that not only do we provide award winning digital signage software and technology solutions, but our company’s creative solutions are also best-in-class in the digital signage industry. We have worked hard to develop end-to-end solutions for our customers and recognize that digital signage programs not only require cutting-edge, dependable software but also engaging and creative content.”

The reason this statement sets me off as a distasteful is because it would seem they are trying to be everything to everyone from the outset. Eventually corporations can work toward that, but initially they need to hunker down, focus on their niche, and milk it for what it’s worth before they branch out into other areas. Expanding product offerings is fine and dandy, but if it’s not as profitable as a core competency, then can it.

I recently read a book entitled Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers. One of the key components of the book was a very simple piece of advice, stay focused on the very focused niche in the market you are into. This is a very counterintuitive statement, but believe me it’s the gospel truth.

I see other companies like Scala, Helius, MediaTile and others sticking to what they know and what they’re good at. Perhaps that’s why their balance sheets don’t have numbers outlined by parenthesis and their CEOs are sticking around a while. Just a thought.

Posted on November 1, 2008 - by Nate

A look at Audience.tag Digital Signage

So Capital Networks is releasing something called Audience.tag which places digital signage on a standard sized name tag that goes on a shirt. It reminds me of the “Pitvertising” which I saw several months ago. It would work for certain situations. I can tell you for myself, I would get annoyed if I had a dynamic digital sign on my chest.

One thing about digital signage is that it’s already a bit less under audience control than other forms of digital media and advertising. What makes this form a bit worse is the fact that you can’t get away from it, especially if you’re the one wearing it.

The device is touted as the “wearable media player.” It’s uses are somewhat limited, but the unique “niche” style that Capital Networks has produced here certainly has some applications including:

• Instant engagement between retail sales staff and customers.
• New product introductions and service launches.
• In store brand and media reinforcement.
• Introducing corporate news.
• Tradeshows.

So, if you’re looking for something that’s obnoxious enough to grab customers’ attention at a tradeshow or the like you may want to try Audience.tag….or maybe not, especially if you’re epileptic.

Posted on October 27, 2008 - by Nate

Dispelling Rumors about the Demise of the Mac Mini.

Why will the Mac Mini not die? Simple: DIGITAL SIGNAGE applications. Think about it for a second, with parnters such as Helius, Nanonation, and Easy Shadow utilizing the Mac Mini as a digital signage media player, do you think Apple is going to pull the plug that quickly. Heck no!

Currently, both Helius and Nanonation are currently rolling out some major digital signage networks allutilizing the Mac Mini as the media playing device. Why the Mac Mini?

• It’s got a decent price point.
• It’s small
• Apple has great support. Especially compared to some of the digital signage media players that are purchased from overseas.
• The partnership with Apple brings in direct referrals from Apple.

Apple would be moronic to destroy the Mac Mini. In fact, I’m sure that the future of the Mac Mini is very secure and that the components, both hardware and software will continue to evolve and improve as only Apple can do.

Posted on October 27, 2008 - by Nate

Titan and Bus Digital Signage

Imagine a 12 foot LED display on the side of a bus that could target time of day, zip-code, block, and ethnicity. Well, it’s a reality. And since Titan plans to invest $90 million into digital signage in the next six months, I would say this is a fairly good start.

The bus digital signage in this case will be rolled out to over 200 buses in New York, Manhatten, and Chicago by first quarter 2009. In this case, the great part of this story is the integration with GPS. The GPS tracking system integrated into the bus digital signage makes for a great way to specifically target the neighborhood of interest. So, for instance, coffee can be advertised in the morning and beer for after work. Kind of crazy.

The original post on this issue stated the following:

Titan Worldwide, which produced the technology, has a 10-year, $800 million contract to sell ad space on the city’s bus and commuter-train systems. Its digital signage — also available on rail and subway vehicles — will appear in key US markets and London, with Ireland and Canada soon to follow, according to the company.

So, if you’re in New York, Manhatten, and/or Chicago expect to see some dynamic bus digital signage. Be aware: you’re probably being targeted.