What I am up to …

May 16, 2009 by Dave Haynes

I have been watching the projection business for a few years now, seeing it evolve and paying close attention to the pros and cons as it relates to what we all do in DS.

These things have the ability to bridge the rather yawning gap between mass-produced but smallish flat panels and huge but stinkin’ expensive LED displays. With projectors and film, retailers and brands can do very large, shaped displays in all kinds of places, and turn building walls and shopfront windows into digital billboards.

Adoption, to date, hasn’t been all that high – but that’s changing as capabilities come up and costs go down. This area could really get some traction soon.

So … that’s one of the big reasons why I have hooked up with a Toronto company called Gridcast Media, which you could call an integrator but is more properly described as a consultancy and project execution company. The founders were industry friends, and I have long been impressed by what they were up to. So when the planets aligned, with my free agency and their acquisition and backstopping by a much larger company, I jumped at the chance to hook up. I am now President of the company, charged with setting the business direction, and driving partnerships and sales.

The company was acquired, as I was coming on, by one of Canada’s biggest large-format printing firms, which is great on a bunch of counts – particularly the ability to really fill a space and communicate a brand message visually.

The nice thing for me is I no longer have just one set of pots and pans to peddle, and suppliers and developers will be way more interested in telling me what they’re up to than when I was a competitor.

Projection is just part of what my guys do well (but it’s more than a bit of a black art, so expertise is critical). We do interactive work, like touchscreens on showroom car windows, and more conventional DS planning and execution. If you want to get a little sense of the kind of work we do, have a look at some of these videos.

http://iconvidfeed.yaqwa.com/dior/dior.html

http://www.gridcast.ca/lexus/lexus.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRx6g8bmjdA

With that laid out, I’ll go back to my normal habit of making it hard to figure out who does this blog and who I work for, and if I post about something involving my company or a client, there will be a disclaimer.

I have no idea how much I will be able to write, as I traded a home office routine for about 2.5 hours of commuting most days (ugh), but I hope to keep up a reasonable pace of posts.

The offer is open to folks who are thinking about blogging but don’t feel they have the time to support their own. I have a few people mulling this, but getting them to pull the trigger is hard, as they find this writing thing intimidating. What I can say is that I used to be a daily newspaper editor and spent the latter half of my shifts turning the Martian submitted by some of my reporters into understandable stories, and quickly. So if you’re worried about your writing chops, I have a black belt in turning most passages into good, friendly reads.