The Digital Signage ExpertOne of the services that I try to provide my readers is to feel the daily pulse of the industry. Each day economic activity produces a series of headlines which I send out to over 10,000 readers. After 24 hours I pull in the database of clicks and discover which of the headlines has been most interesting. This headline is posted again the next day. Usually this creates more traffic as those that may have overlooked the news the day before are now curious.
So it was with David Weinfeld’s article The Value of Real-Time Data. Here he outlines the advantages of using real time data to drive content on digital signage displays. My own opinion mirrors that of David’s and I feel that this is one of the core concepts that is often overlooked in many of today’s projects. Any business constantly produces a series of numbers that can be of benefit to viewers inside an organization or out. Many call these KPI’s. The easiest would be to tap into an ERM or EPOS system and visualise the present situation. A picture speaks, especially if it is live, depending what is in it and who it is targeting.
Going back many years while I was a Hedge Fund Manager in Switzerland my whole business depended on real time data, data so real that it reflected a global situation only a few seconds old. Reuter’s provided minute by minute news and computers generated the reaction to that news. More computers spewed out suggestions of what to buy and sell. This in a nutshell is what today’s digital signage should be doing. Either it’s for the boardroom, Sales and planning department or lastly for shoppers in deciding the best product for their money.
We are all hedge fund managers because of our constant manipulating of incoming data to reflect the outgoing of our purse. What would be better than to enter a shopping mall or retail store and view stock levels and changing prices all properly visualised for our convenience. Stopping for a few moments time in the local Café to quickly study what’s happenin’ would guide me to the right shop at the right time. Would I return to that environment? You bet, especially if it had produced a savings for me with the right product of my desires.
Lets’ look at an example scenario of a shopping trip beginning with a planning coffee at ones’favourite watering hole like a Starbucks. Here you plan your day and doing some last minute decision making while following some action on the screens around you. Suddenly you notice a small section popping up and growing bigger by the minute, pushing aside all other action on the screen. It’s a visualisation for a local travel agent who is signalling that seats on a plane going out next week to Jamaica are dwindling fast due to a promotion they have on. The graphic gets bigger as the seat number drops causing several people to begin to pick up their phones to reserve a spot. From timing and price the offer was too good to overlook and you were able to secure a trip either by phone or a quick visit to the local shop. As the seats filled up the graphic suddenly disappears from the screen, replaced by other graphics of activity in camera shops and surf gear, and bought by those that got discount coupons from the travel office for booking early. All this happening automatically, no human intervention other than their activity. What great informative content, what great entertainment too. In essence if you sat there the rest of the day you could feel the pulse of commerce travelling through your environment.
I admit this is an extreme situation, but in some places this is already being practised by means of mobile phones. Multiple activities are today being linked together through such tools as customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Smart integrators are able to fish for data to display by competent visualizers resulting in dynamic calls to action.
Recently during consultancy I am doing for a retail chain about the future of digital signage I found some fascinating facts. Searching for help and information, I talked to an acquaintance who had been a former member of RAND and a designer of ARPANET. Among other networks ARPANET is also linked to NORSAR (Norwegian Seismic Array) and SDAC (Seismic Data Analysis Center) in Alexandria, Virginia. A satellite link transmits NORSTAR real-time data to SDAC. There it is combined and correlated with data from other non-secret global arrays to achieve a composite picture and made available to selected ARPANET users, including the NSA (National Security Agency) with whom it maintains a direct link. This my friends is real-time data heaven. What is being planned here and still in laboratories is the reading of the economy’s mind. The Departments of Neurometrics at Stanford and New York University have brought the EEG to a new degree of sophistication by using computers to remove artefacts, such as sixty cycle hum and eye and body movements, to compute the wave shape of the AER (average evoked response) to a particular stimulus, i.e. Digital Signage.
What is being picked up are the signals produced by humans around the world. We can rest assured that our thoughts cannot be read by the person standing next to us, but they can be read by satellite. Unbeknownst to you, every action, thought, and emotion, can result in driving the muscles involved in vocalization. The nerve impulses that activate them produce paths of electric potentials in the brain and muscles. The nerve impulse or electric potential is a miniature electrochemical explosion that travels along outside the nerve fiber as a vortex ring of negative ions.
To get to the point, it is soon possible to “read” the mood shoppers are in using real-time data from any point on earth and reflect that mood through visualisations on screens where needed. Too far out? Don’t bet on it. Entertainment companies are fast working on using brainwaves to play computer games. Very good progress is being tracked in this realm.
To put it in a nutshell, our industry has only just scratched the surface in using this kind of technology. Competition will drive developments. I outlined above what is happening in red brick universities, these developments will reach monetization stage shortly. They will appear in our software soon be it in watered down state. Those that have the experience in using digital signage effectively will be seeking this kind of power.
There are special companies out there already that know exactly how to match up the live incoming data and visualise it. I’ve interviewed one CEO of a Canadian company just last year who has seen the light in this respect. I am sure he is even more aware of what is happening than my research uncovered for me. Real Time digital signage is here, using photo’s and film clips of what happened in the past is not breaking out of the box; it is using new technology in a Neanderthal way.