As customers, we all crave simple, easy and quick.
But when we’re vendors we make what we sell complex, difficult to support, hard to administer and as such capital intensive so we need investors to back us and all of us prefer to lump our developers into one group, QA into another and have support shield both. We create overly complex stuff and we serve it up in silos of expertise. I think we do it to justify our existence, I might be wrong, but it makes us all really important and we like that.
What if we didn’t have that urge to be really important, grandiose, and we didn’t feel like we have to prove our value through the mass of what we offer and the specialized teams required to deliver it? What if we prided ourselves on how simple our stuff is?
What if what we sold was simple and because it was simple it wasn’t hard to support.
What if one of the ways we made it simple was to make sure that it only addressed what people really needed and what if our developers and QA people were completely aligned with the simple philosophy and they knew exactly what the customer wanted because they were domain experts?
What if we took that simple product, built for exactly what people needed, no more, and we actually made it really easy to understand what it does, what it costs and customers could all try it out ad nauseam before they actually purchased it?
What if we made it real simple to purchase and eliminated all of the post purchase administration questions of what was that bill for, where’s my credit, why haven’t you paid me, etc. etc.?
What if because what we did was so simple that the cost to do it was really reasonable and we didn’t need investors? What if we spent all of our time creating something valuable rather than gathering and managing other peoples money?
What if we took all of those silos; sales@domain.com, support@domain.com, admin@domain.com, investors@domain.com, developers@domain.com and qualityassurance@domain.com and we said, let’s just have one group email address called support@domain.com and we all belong to it and we all can answer any question that comes through it, and more importantly we can all learn by watching what get’s asked and how it get’s responded to?
I think if we did that our customers would get their simple, easy and quick craving fulfilled every time they pulled up to our store. I’d bet they come to the store more often and tell all of their friends about it as well.
We need to change.
But we don’t want to.
I need a change.
But I’m afraid to.
We have to change.
But I’m comfortable the way it is.
I need your help to change.
Sorry, you talking to me?
Together we can make this change.
Just tell me what to do.
Forget it. I need to change who I am talking to.
Afraid of failing?
Afraid of what it might take to succeed?
Come up with every reason why it won’t work.
Hire a consultant.
Have a meeting.
Look at the greener grass elsewhere.
Pretend it never happened.
Wait for perfect circumstance.
Don’t try. Then you can’t fail.
Make it your purpose to not try.
And then wonder why the world keeps passing you by.
First off, boy can Google throw a conference. To promote Android and their latest release everyone (5,000 people) at the conference received two phones! Not to mention your usual t-shirt, pens and socks and did I mention they fed us – breakfast, lunch and dinner – unbelievable. Yes, you did read that right, I am now the owner of a pair of Google branded socks. I still don’t get that one.
Socks aside, what did I learn? So much my brain hurts and what follows is a slightly technical and very condensed summary which assumes you, the reader, knows digital signage, Google technology and where we’re going with marrying the two. And as always, if your missing something don’t hesitate to ask. Here goes:
Open sourced and extensible software provides for the fastest and greatest innovation possible. We have done the right thing in our next release by providing both a platform that is completely accessible through API’s and the open sourcing of our front end user interface and our digital signage player. Scary for the typical “create proprietary something and protect the crap out of it business dude” but it is time to park the brutally slow old ways and leverage the crowd for rapid innovation.
Gadgets are the future of content. Create once, embed anywhere and sell everywhere. And they are becoming more and more contextually aware.
Create the platform for large format displays running Mac, Linux or Windows Players then adopt Android to take it to mobile devices, TV (Google TV!) and large format displays – marry the sign post with the personal display and rather than standing separate from TV adopt and use it as a distribution medium.
Use Google advertising and the personal display (mobile advertising) to close the loop on “eyeball” verification for digital signage to increase potential advertising reach and therefore revenue. Don’t build advertising media asset and distribution management applications – use the web advertising model and incorporate web tools to provide the means to enable digital signage advertising management on our network.
You can build global digital signage management applications that can scale and be highly responsive. Our new benchmark – all user interactions must happen in 100ms or less – gulp – and the tool to make it happen – SpeedTracer (from Google) is awesome for finding every little bottleneck in code on the client side and now(!) on the server side as well.
Google web tool kit just got even better. We have incredible tools for creating a browser app that both meets the expectations of a typical desktop app and because of connectivity – available everywhere – exceed the desktop in every way.
Google Wave has gone to labs and it now works with enterprise Google accounts (which we have) – no more need for invitations – and it will support printing within the next month or two. We are going to move all of our scrums, collaboration and journals from email, docs and sites to Wave. Should be really interesting to see where this goes and what it does for productivity.
The future is HTML5 and it is here now. Build for HTML5, forget legacy browsers, they are going the way of the dinosaur and there is no point dumbing down what we do for them, from here on in we are aiming at the smartest browser possible.
HTML5 web app caching can and does solve all online / offline continuity issues. Chromium (our Player) can provide a reliable viewer for displays that have lousy internet connections.
Players that manage their updates by polling their servers have far too much overhead to maintain near real-time updates and monitoring. Real-time push to the browser is here and it is the way to go.
Google storage has arrived and it is designed for heavy data asset upload, storage, and download on a global basis and it can provide the repository for media asset management for digital signage on a scalable and predictive cost model.
The Google Apps marketplace is working and it does provide distribution opportunities for developers that they have never seen before. And, it is creating an expanding source of highly capable resellers for us.
Bottom line, we are on the right track, our next rev digital signage management application can and does leverage all of the above, and we can deliver it for far less than what our current app costs.
Thank you Google! I can’t wait for next years IO!
Straight out pitch for a good friend of mine and my favorite photographer!
If you or your digital signage needs photographs, you need Andre, check him out at www.giantvision.ca.
Looking for video content for your digital signage? Interesting product from nowmov. As their tagline says “What’s the world watching now?”. Their product provides an endless stream of YouTube videos in a very clean and simple site that analyzes the Twitter public timeline to look for commonly shared YouTube links. Could be a very interesting product for digital signage content – TV replacement anyone? And, if you could take it one step further to make the timeline location aware so that you could narrow the interests even further that would be cool. For example I’m in Toronto, show me all videos that Toronto is following now, or another twist, use any element of the Twitter search API to narrow my interests or jump on the Facebook social graph bandwagon and see what the world is “liking” right now.
According to a YouTube video, Socialnomics, just posted 2 days ago, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and in the time it takes to watch their video (4 minutes and 25 seconds) over 100 hours of video will be uploaded. Doesn’t seem like there will be any shortage of great content to keep us entertained and if that content is crowd sourced what a great way to keep what is relevant, right now, and I mean right, right, right, now, on your screens to entertain your audience. To put it all in perspective, video content should be crowd sourced in real-time, using social media to direct it, and nothing better to put that in perspective than the YouTube video on just that:
One more piece to add to your digital signage “mashup” brought to you by SongVote and as reported by Mashable here.
I can imagine a venue – a work place, campus and just about any place that people gather that plays music either in the foreground as the main attraction or in the background as ambient entertainment. Now, let the people who are in the venue see what’s on, vote for the next song in the queue or add a song to be voted upon, all from your mobile phone, all displayed on your signpost – your digital signage!
Now this is very cool use of an interactive environment to teach us something.
Interesting article in Mashable on Why Schools are Turning to Google Apps. One of the largest growth areas for digital signage is education, and, if education is moving to adopt overwhelmingly Google then this is great news for our next version of our digital management web service, which, if you didn’t already know, we built it on top of the Google App engine.
The adoption of our new solution by an institution that has already moved to Google will be incredibly simple. Fortuitous!
The Wall Street Journal just partnered with Foursquare (the location-based social network) to include their editorial tips and badges in Foursquare – how cool is that! See the full scoop from Mashable here.
I think the next extension of this is to take location based social networking further and put a signpost up to let everyone know that there is more happening right here, right now, then you see in the physical world. There is a digital world happening around this location and you, the customer, passerby should check it out. I think the missing ingredient in location based social networking is the advertising of the virtual world for this physical location.
How neat would it be to have interactive signage in your business that not only show’s your menu, latest video’s, today’s specials, whatever, but it also gives you a quick and easy way to become a fan on Facebook or follow them on Twitter and also show what’s happening right now on Foursquare with your business and maybe your neighbors.
I think this would be one great content gadget for digital signage.
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