News from the summit

February 9, 2006 by Dave Haynes

Spent a couple of days hanging out at the Strategy Institute’s digital signage show in Toronto.

New location. Free parking (if you look around). Better food. Fewer people. The organizers put on a good event, but they need to work at getting better speakers and start spreading the shows apart more. Some of the people there had just seen each other two weeks ago at the show in Lost Wages.

The trade show floor was fairly spartan — populated by Capital Networks, Panasonic, Artisan Live, AVW Telav, Digital View, LG, Scala, Sony, AdFlow and Sharp. The biggest buzz seem to be around interactive displays, both at shelf edge and on big honking screens.

Most impressive sighting: Sharp’s new 65 inch LCD. Wow. And at $22,000, it should be Wow!

Coolest thing: The interactive touch panel Windsor, Ontario’s McGill Business Solutions was touting in the Panasonic booth. This is one of those gadget screens that TV traffic reporters use to zoom in on traffic cameras and maps to show where the pile-ups and rubberneckers are located. But it didn’t take a lot of thinking to scheme up some interesting ideas around wayfinding and advertising applications. One problem – the very nice mcGill guy was a little wishy-washy on price … which usually means LOTS.

My takeaway from the show. Lots of activity and the people there — those not working directly in the business — were on a mission to find solutions, noy just kick tires.