One of the reasons these blog articles have been so few and far between this year (and were nonexistant last year) is because we've been busy diversifying here at WireSpring. Way back in 2000 we started out primarily as a kiosk software company, and deployed dozens of projects across thousands of locations to let users apply for in-store credit, enter sweepstakes to win prizes, and print coupons to encourage up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. As the digital signage market began to expand, we made a slight pivot to include digital signage in our offering. This made a lot of sense, as we basically treated digital signage like a specific kiosk app and were able to happily continue developing our platform.

A few years ago, we saw the opportunity to pivot again, this time into what's called the Internet of Things (IoT). At the time we were calling it M2M (machine-to-machine communications), but that's neither here nor there. We've since been party to a number of really interesting projects, all of which incorporate some elements of digital signage into much more complex devices that are deployed everywhere from hospitals to department stores to C-stores. All of which are also quite different from the plain-vanilla digital signage that we continue to deploy for waiting rooms, corporate communications, digital menu boards and the rest. And of course we've been keeping our tech guys busy with growing our platform, focusing a bit more on device management stuff rather than content management, scheduling and playback compliance.

Long story short (which is clearly a struggle for me), we've been swamped, and for the last year I've found myself putting in the kinds of founder's hours I thought I had left behind a decade ago. Frown emoji. But, our new website is in place. The rats nest of infrastructure that we've replaced has made things faster, more maintainable and easier to upgrade. And a pile of customer projects are finally moving into that "mature" status that means more free time for me. If anybody's still interested, I'll be resuming a semi-regular blogging schedule pretty soon. Probably not every week, but hopefully at least a few times a month. Old weblinks should continue to work forever. New links will be published to https://www.wirespring.com/blogs/dsinsider  We're separately maintaining an Internet of Things-themed blog (cleverly) called M2M Insider, should can be found at https://www.wirespring.com/blogs/m2minsider should you feel so inclined.

So to both of my readers, I just want to say thanks for checking in!