Digital Signage Expo follow up

Headrest kiosks by Tapinto
Originally uploaded by Tim Burke Kiosk Guy

Well, I've had a few days to recover from the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas Feb 27th - 28th 2008, and I'm ready for a few more comments. First let me say, Vegas can really wear you out. It seems like the only time I go is for tradeshows and I spend 5-6 hours walking around tradeshows shaking hands, talking, meeting and greeting and kissing babies (not actually). And everywhere you go in Vegas someone is charging you twice the value of the service or product (because you are in Vegas) and it take forever to get around the city. I made the mistake of thinking the show was at Mandalay Bay convention center when I booked our rooms, so we ended up having to take planes, trains and automobiles to the far side of the strip both days to get to the "Las Vegas Convention Center". Ugh. At least the center is very nice and the show was well organized. The food court is not half bad either!

Okay, the first photo is of a headrest kiosk network by TapInto which is a British firm that has a GSM network of kiosks inside of the headrests of cabs / Taxis (see first picture). They plan to expand this into more than just cabs, but are busy growing this network first. Very impressive setup with a nice clean interface allowing guests to view news, movies, television, play games, see maps, find local dining, and see discounts from sponsors. I think the sponsor area can even send coupons to your cell phone if I remember correctly. Their booth had a London style taxi with a larger flat screen inside for a larger interface as well, all set to some cool music. Nice booth guys! David Welsh shown here is their technical director and a very knowledgeable resource at TapInto.

Other cool things at the show include Admart's booth of low tech small screen Point of Purchase video players called AdView. Sure, its not touch screen (has play buttons) and it only supports video... but this can be a low cost product demo tool that is small enough for onshelf display. We have 3-4 RFPs that can benefit from this product, as a full touch screen interactive hardware device is too expensive for their budgets. These guys are not far from our Cincinnati location, they are in Danville Kentucky! See them online at http://www.admart.com/adview.html.

TruMedia had a special camera setup that can watch how many faces actually view your digital signage. It was really cool, you could see how it highlighted faces that it recognized and were pointed towards the screen. A nice reporting interface gave charts and graphs of the number of visitors, repeat views, and various demographics. Another vendor named CognoVision had a similar product that could use any video camera (not TruMedia's proprietary hardware) and had similar capabilities. Very cool measurement tools!

Did you attend the expo or exhibit? Share you comments below and let's discuss!