Video Blog: Wandering The Sides And Back Of The DSE Floor

March 6, 2013 by Dave Haynes

It took a while, but here’s the second of three video posts we shot last week on the DSE show floor.

The premise for this one is simple enough. People naturally gravitate to the big booths when they walk into trade shows. Being slightly nuts, and having been at this show many, many times, I tend to go left and right and make my way back to the smaller booths – where there are new companies and sometimes some things and services I didn’t know about.

I could have shot a whole bunch of interviews, but time was limited and we took a quick look at five booths:

Perch Interactive – Very clever interactive projection for merchandising. Stupid me asked what the projection surface was, thinking there was some high gain film thing on it. It was a cheap, white Ikea table.

Tannas – They can cut and re-seal first articles of LCDs to weird sizes, like a 4:16 aspect ratio. Then they have partners who can manufacturer in larger numbers. Did not know this could be done.

Opticon/Aerva – An electronic shelf label company is driving pricing and product info to little shelf-edge screens, that can last years on a single charge, using Aerva’s digital signage platform. The means Aerva’s portfolio ranges from a huge LED curtain on the NYC Port Authority Terminal to little $10 electronic price labels. Cool.

Taggalo – An Italian start-up, from a media lab there, that uses pattern detection to look at a digital signage screen and recognize and count individual creative pieces. So proof of play goes from log files to actual counts of every time an ad plays on a screen. I’m not sure how demanded this level of compliance is in the marketplace, but the idea was intriguing.

Hear My Lips – Think about being in a sports bar, on NFL Sunday, and there are 6 games (or whatever) on at once. One game has the audio running in the house. But not your game. This uses an intermediary device to send that broadcast’s audio out via wifi, so you can hear it on your smartphone’s ear buds. The guy said there applications for digital signage (not convinced), but the bar thing I totally get.

As I say in the closing, I know I didn’t get to ALL kinds of cool stuff. So, sorry, but time is finite, as are the good graces of the Studio 10 guys who shot and edited this stuff largely for giggles.