Archive for What About
We’ve got an interview coming up next week with Eric Kanagy, the CEO of RedPost, the company that we’ve blogged about before here that offers a DIY wireless picture frame kit. Something that I knew less about prior to the interview is that RedPost isn’t really a hardware company — they’re a digital signage company that sells hardware.
After talking to Eric, I’ve been thinking about digital signage. I wrote in this space a few months ago about the benefits that wireless digital picture frames could offer to tradeshow exhibitors. But the digital signage market goes far beyond that. It encompasses menus at fast-food restaurants, arrival and departure displays at airports, local information kiosks at hotels, displays in banks, and much more.
There are many companies already operating in the digital signage space. A quick Googling turns up a handful of interesting ones on the first page or so:
3M is, of course, the biggest name that my Googling offers up. Their Digital Signage division offers its clients a combination of consulting, hardware, software, and support to deploy their digital signage networks and content.
The other two companies, Navori and Helius, are new to me.
Navori offers some interesting features, including the ability to play media types like video, Flash, and PowerPoint. They complement these features with touchscreens and RFID options. They don’t, however, seem to offer wireless networking features.
Helius, on the other hand, does offer wireless networking and provides content that will sound familiar to FrameChannel users — news, weather, and sports feeds.
As far as I can tell from their websites, all three companies require customers to use proprietary systems, servers, and software to operate their digital signage networks. When you combine proprietary equipment with custom consulting, I suspect that these networks must be pretty expensive to design and install (one analysis I found suggests that the cost of operating a single digital sign for three years could be over $12,000).
When I look at that figure, and at RedPost’s $550 price for their DIY frame kit, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t an opportunity here.
Many current digital signage offerings combine proprietary software with expensive plasma displays. It seems to be that there’s an opportunity for a smart, lean digital frame company to apply the open technology and lessons of digital frames to digital signage.
This kind of solution could use much lower-cost LCD displays (a couple hundred dollars vs. over $2,000 for a plasma screen), RSS feeds, wireless networking, and open web technologies to push content to a network of frames. A web management tool would need to be created to manage and display the content. Some more standards for frame software and hardware might also need to be developed to smooth out this process.
I’d wager that this kind of digital sign network wouldn’t be robust enough at first to replace many current digital sign installations. The really powerful features might need to be built as the network grows. But I think it would appeal to a whole new market, to businesses that are attracted to the technology but don’t have the budget to spend $12,000 on a single sign.
I suspect a smart digital frame company could create a success business here. That frame company could be RedPost. It could be someone we haven’t yet heard of. But if this kind of digital sign network appears, we might see a lot more digital signs a lot sooner than we expect.
Since the beginning of the year, many new digital picture frames have been announced from companies too numerous to keep track of. Some major names — including Toshiba and Samsung — have entered the market. One commonality of I’ve noticed among many of these new frames, though, is that almost none of them offer built-in WiFi.
Perhaps not surprisingly, at WirelessPictureFrame.com, we believe that WiFi is going to be the foundation upon which the success of the digital picture frame industry is built. So, seeing so many new frames without WiFi has led me to wonder recently, what about WiFi?
In just the past two weeks, there have been two pretty high-profile digital frame announcements, one from Toshiba, the other from PanDigital.
Toshiba’s announcement of its Tekbright frame launched the company into this space. Yet, despite coming into the market years after many of its competitors, the Tekbright frame offers basically the same set of features as many other frames: good resolution, support for removable media cards, some built-in memory.
PanDigital’s new slate of products does feature network options —both WiFi and Bluetooth. Neither option is built into the frames, though. Instead, both are offered as adapters purchased separately from a frame.
What’s making me curious is why frame manufacturers aren’t using WiFi as a selling feature? Especially since WiFi is likely to be the feature that unlocks the true value of digital picture frames.
One argument could be that the cost of adding WiFi to frames would push them out of impulse-buy territory. Perhaps. Frame makers need to maintain their margins to keep growing, of course, but I wonder how much additional cost included WiFi would require. Remember that DIY digital frame article at Popular Science we linked to a few weeks ago? That guy added wireless to his frame using an off-the-shelf WiFi card that cost $30 retail.
I’d expect that manufacturers buying in bulk could get better pricing than that. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that $30 is the increase in cost that a wireless frame requires. Is a $30 price difference for more features a make-or-break change on a frame that already costs $120-$200? I’d expected that most people would be willing to shell out a little extra for Internet connectivity, but I don’t know. Perhaps frame makers have research indicating that the increased cost would mean decreased sales.
Another possible explanation for the lack of WiFi, and the one I put more stock in right now, is the support overhead WiFi could create. I haven’t yet used a wireless frame whose setup process was completely simple. I’m pretty technologically savvy, so I can imagine what kind of challenge it might be for a lay user. A frustrating user experience at set up, and during the life of the frame, would lead to two things that frame makers don’t want: negative perceptions from customers and increased tech-support costs.
If WiFi is hard to set up or maintain, customers are going to be frustrated, which is always bad for sales. On top of that, they’re likely to place more calls to tech support, making that area of the business more costly, which isn’t great either.
Whatever the reason (and if there are other reasons that I haven’t considered, I’d love to hear from readers on them), without WiFi, the advances introduced in these new frames are incremental. With WiFi, they advances are much bigger – turning the frame into a net-connected device that can do much, much more than just show pictures from your digital camera.
The leaps and bounds that this market should grow by seem most likely to come from a really compelling product. I’d wager that that product — whether it’s here already or has yet to be released — is going to have WiFi built in. We’ve got a few months before the holiday shopping season arrives, so new products will still come along. I hope more of these products have built-in WiFi.
If you’ve ridden in a cab in most any major U.S. city in the last few years, you’ve probably noticed that many of them have backseat LCD screens that feature advertising. It makes sense: advertisers get a captive audience and cab companies get an extra revenue source (the passenger doesn’t get much out of it, probably, but like I said, captive audience).
It strikes me that the advances coming to digital picture frame and LCD technology may bring these advertising panels to many more places. One place that seems ripe for adoption of these panels is public transportation.
Busses and subway cars are already plastered with strips of advertising near the tops of their compartments. Those ads cost advertisers money to print and take public-transit-employee time to replace. As a result, they’re frequently out of date. But, what if those spots were replaced by wireless digital frames? I can image the scenario playing out like this:
The LCDs would need to be ultra-thin, light, and flexible. That tiny, bendable OLED screen that Sony showed off about a month ago would fit the bill. Sure, that needs to get a little bigger, but size will come with time.
The busses and trains would need to be outfitted with WiFi, but that shouldn’t be so complicated. It’s not uncommon these days for limos to have WiFi onboard for passengers. Trains and busses could use the same hardware and since many cities are already investing in free, municipal wireless, the network would already be in place.
The WiFi signal would be virtually uninterrupted for busses, of course, but trains would lose their connections when they go underground. Underground wireless hubs or a robust caching plan would be the solution here, because those screens will be doing a lot more than just showing ads that are updated once a week. These screens will be showing regularly updated content that people actually want to see: weather, news headlines, sports news and scores, entertainment headlines.
To further enhance the value of these screens, location-specific information could be added. The screens could display listings for events happening in the city that day and provide maps of how to get to them on the bus or subway. They could even provide event listings for each stop on the subway when the train arrives there. These listings could be complemented with photos of the area or similar events.
None of this will succeed, of course, if taxpayers end up footing the bill for what are — let’s face it — very cool, but not very necessary, enhancements to their public transit systems.
So, not only would the transit system need to charge for ads, it could also auction off the content space. So, Boston’s MBTA, for instance, might sell the rights for news headlines to ABC and for sports scores to ESPN, while the Bay Area’s BART could have CBS news and Weather Channel forecasts.
The final thing that would need to be addressed is the stability of the panels. After all, no one is going to like looking up from a book or newspaper only to be greeted by the public transit equivalent of a Blue Screen of Death.
Get a few things straightened out, though, and not only might public transit start making more money (thus enabling its expansion and doing us all a favor), but riding it might become a little more fun when you forget your book or iPod.
