MediaTile’s Assets Picked Up By Toronto’s Corum Digital Corp

August 6, 2012 by Dave Haynes

Toronto-based Corum Digital Corporation has bought the assets of Scotts Valley, California-based MediaTile, the second company picked up by Corum in the past year or so.

The deal doesn’t come with any announced numbers, but MediaTile was thought to have been struggling fairly mightily for the last couple of years, so this was probably – emphasis on probably – a fire sale buy.

This acquisition, says a release, complements and strengthens Corum Digital’s existing suite of digital signage products marketed under the firmCHANNEL brand. Corum is excited to welcome the MediaTile team to its corporate family.

“MediaTile’s long history of innovation in Digital Signage dates back to 2003 and includes industry leading products such as Digital Sign in a Box, MediaCast Video Presence, MediaCast CMS and HumanKiosk that truly changed the face of digital signage,” said Amedeo Tarzia, President and CEO of Corum Digital Corporation.

“This combined with hundreds of loyal customers and distributors globally, that represent thousands of customer touch points, with some individual deployments approaching 1,000 screens, made this acquisition a very important one for Corum Digital in strengthening its position as a leader in the digital signage space.”

“This is a great opportunity for The MediaTile Company and our customers and distributors alike,” said Chuck Gose, MediaTile’s VP, Sales and Marketing. “With the help of the Corum team, we will continue to grow our product lines and customer base while providing additional resources to all of our global clients.”

MediaTile’s main schtick has been its early integration with cellular connectivity in an all-in-one unit. That was kinda sorta interesting at first, but over time it would have increasingly generated a “Yeah … so?” reaction. The marketplace fairly quickly grasped there was no real magic to using cellular broadband that would narrow the options down to a particular vendor

More lately, MediaTile had been focusing on interactive retail stations.

Corum acquired Windsor, Ontario-based eLiquidMedia (firmCHANNEL) last year, and has revived that brand. There was a firmChannel stand at DSE in March, which got a “I thought they were dead?” reaction out of me. Corum is more established doing mobile business solutions and professional technology services, and the digital signage thing is still pretty new. It’s a bit of a reach for the company to be saying the MediaTile deal strengthens its position as a leader, though scores of companies somehow declare themselves as leaders.

Corum is based in Woodbridge, which is a Toronto suburb near-ish to the international airport. The company badly needs a new website.

Not sure what Corum will do with two different builds of a content management platform, but MediaTile would have IP in its Human Kiosk platform.  Hope the job losses are minimal in consolidation, though I don’t think MediaTile had a buncha people lately. Like less than five in Scotts Valley.

There will be more of these sorts of announcements coming along as the herd continues to thin. There are a few FOR SALE signs out there, and a few companies sniffing around for more money.

 

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