Day One – Strategy Institute

June 8, 2010 by Dave Haynes

First some whining. Lordy it is hot  here.

With that out of the way, I can tell you about Day One at the Strategy Institute’s Digital Signage Technology Summit. I am not going to write a bunch about it because I didn’t learn a whole bunch, and if you are a regular reader, you also would have come away mildly upgraded in your knowledge.

That stated, industry vets were not the target audience. If you were new to the space – the case for most of the 50 or so attending – it was very much worthwhile. If I learned anything it was that there is a big slab of the business public that doesn’t read blogs, doesn’t read white papers, and is ready and willing to make all the mistakes we all made when we got started.

Happily, these people spent the money and time to come to this kind of event and get better educated about what to do and what not to do. For their companies, this is money well-spent.

My highlight was, as expected, a session by Chaki Ng of MIT’s Media Lab. Ng is a researcher finishing up his PhD at Harvard while working at the revered technology school.

As you might imagine, he was thick as a plank. Kidding. Seriously smart, as you’d expect.

He ran through the interactive screens MIT set up for one of its sponsor days, which were sprinkled around the lab’s sexy new building. They responded to RFID transmitters on name tags of visitors and allowed some pretty unique interactions with screens and other visitors.

Hard to describe in brief, but it was a glimpse of the possible. I loved the user experience,which was all built in HTML5 and Jquery. It reinforced my point of view that web services can take over for Flash and supplant a lot of proprietary interactive systems. It is still early days, but HTML5 has a LOT of possibilities.

Back there tomorrow, at least in morning. Good news, though. It’s only supposed to be 104F tomorrow!!!