Sam Costello, Editor-in-Chief of WirelessPictureFrame has interviewed the movers and shakers of the digital frame market over the last year. All speak of the growing market and emergence of the (wireless) digital frame as an information appliance.
Great reading for those following the industry! Watch for more from Sam over the coming months.
Steve Woo, Vice President of Sales, Viewsonic
Eric Kanagy, CEO of RedPost
Alan Phillips, Co-Founder of FrameMedia
Andrew Caffey, Executive Vice President, PF Digital
JT VonLunen, President of AllDigitalFrames.com
Joe DiMare, CEO of Bigeframe
Dean Finnegan, Pandigital
Bryan Zmijewski, Lucky Oliver
Tom Berarducci, Consumer Imaging Systems Group at Kodak
Harry Wang, Parks Associates
RedPost is a small start-up software, and out of necessity, hardware company, based in Goshen, Indiana. The company first came to national attention thanks to its DIY digital picture frame kit, which includes a 19-inch LCD screen, a mini PC with wireless networking capabilities, and Linux, making the kit totally configurable and a tinkerer’s dream. But, it turns out, the digital frame kit is just a means to an end. The plan, according to CEO Eric Kanagy, is to develop the software backbone to create low-cost digital signage networks. Kanagy recently took some time to speak with us about RedPost’s genesis, future, and its commitment to sustainable practices.
Tell me about how you decided to start RedPost. What was the impetus?
What it came down to was that I couldn’t find anyone else doing what I was looking for. I had looked at this whole idea about 4 years ago and LCD prices were too high at that point. I was working for a local non-profit arts organization and was trying to think of ways that we could get the word out about the theater that we were doing and so looked at building a system like what is now RedPost/Goshen. Then, it was far too expensive.
This past fall, I started looking at it again … (and found that) LCD prices were half of what they were and then started looking into the digital signage market itself. Everything was very expensive, very proprietary, closed. Nothing was really what I would want in a digital signage system, which would be able to do whatever I wanted.
What was your background before starting the company?
I was a computer science major in college and I worked a summer for Transmeta out in Silicon Valley right at the height of the boom, right before the bubble burst. I worked for another tech company, a start-up, in Charlottesville, Virginia. I was developing software, web-based software. I have a pretty heavy tech background.
How many people are at RedPost right now?
There are three of us. Myself and two software designers.
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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.
Scott Walker, the assistant managing editor of The Birmingham (Al.) News, has got a great blog post about how he converted an old newspaper box into a web-connected digital frame.
With a newspaper box bought from eBay, a Mac mini, some hardware, and a little deft coding, he was able to replace the box’s window with an LCD panel. Now, every day, the box connects to the Internet over his home wireless network, grabs the front pages of a number of newspapers, displays them in a slideshow in the window, and can even play music. The software he wrote can grabs RSS feeds and email, too.
Not likely the kind of product that could see mass production, but a terrific project with a great result, especially in light of the recent release of a DIY wireless frame kit. Head on over to Walker’s site to see more photos, the process he went through to build the box, and check out a video of the box in action.
