Category: Digital Merchandising
MS Surface goes live in AT&T Wireless Stores (a first hand account)
The PR folks at Microsoft have to be feeling pretty good. On March 26th Fortune Magazine and others reported that Microsoft’s often hyped multi-touch user interface product, Surface, would not be ready for consumers until 2011. Less than a week later, AT&T Wireless stores and Microsoft announced that Surface would be going live in select AT&T Wireless stores on April 17th (via Engadget, CNET, and BoyGenius). (more)
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Microsoft Surface in 2011
In my 2008 CES recap post, I mentioned that while Microsoft had some great demos, and did a terrific job of brainstorming customer experiences for a multi-touch interface, I didn’t expect them to be able to get the Surface hardware to market.
According to Fortune Magazine, Microsoft now doesn’t expect to make Surface available until 2011. I’m guessing we’ll see multi-touch implementations from others long before that.
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Digital Billboard Sabotage on La Brea?
It almost happened. A number of Clear Channel digital billboards in Los Angeles appeared to get hacked, in the first appearance of digital graffiti that I’ve heard of. As it turns out however, the graffiti was actually a purchased advertisement on the signs, made to look like a hack. A clever marketing gimmick to be sure, the digital equivalent of the "advitorial." (more)
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Global Shop Day One – Where is everyone?
Global Shop has long been one of my favorite shows. I love to hang out with lots of smart people who spend their days thinking about great retail experiences.
This year’s show got off to a slow start. After getting swamped in our booth the last two years, I was surprised to the trickle of people coming by. Our traffic is probably down 25% from last year, and although we’re seeing most of our key clients, we’re not seeing as many new prospects as we’d usually expect. (more)
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Digital Signage Expo
Las Vegas, Feb 25-26. Digital Signage Expo (DSE). This was the fourth year of the show, which used to be called the Digital Retail Expo. This is one of several shows trying to become the main destination for vendors and customers of Digital Signage and Kiosks Digital Merchandising. The show moved from Chicago to Las Vegas this year, which prompted some discussion in the blogosphere (Bill Gerba and Dave Haynes). The show is making nice progress with more exhibitors and more attendees each year. Most exciting the attendees this year weren’t just integrators looking at Digital Signage as a new industry to enter, but also end users (like retailers and public venue owners) looking to learn more about best practices. If I had to bet on one stand alone Digital Signage trade show to survive, I’d bet on this one right now. (more)
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You’ve got questions… we’ve got answers.
DigitalSignageToday.com recently sent a list of FAQ’s to a variety of companies involved in deploying Digital Signage, and published the responses as a Free FAQ for the industry.
It’s interesting to see where the respondents tended to agree vs. where there was a significant diversity of answers. You may want to take some of my sarcastic answers with a grain of salt, as I had a limited amount of time to write my responses. You can download the PDF for free, here.
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DIGI Awards
Yet another thing we have too much of in the digital merchandising / retail design space is awards. I like to take credit for my teams hard work get recognized for my work just as much as the next guy… OK more than the next guy.
But when is the last time you saw a shopper buy an extra accessory for their IPOD because the display it was on won an award? Worse there are so many awards, that none can really stand out as a special achievement. (more)
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