The Digital Signage Insider

Continuing on with the search for other people's blogs about kiosks and digital signage, today I'll look at the results for "digital signage" and "blog" or "weblog" from some of the top search engines

Now first off, let me explain why I use Google, Yahoo and Altavista as my primary search engines, and not, say, msn search. It pretty much boils down to how badly each company taints its search results. For example, up until very recently, a search for "Linux" at MSN would yield a first page full of supposedly relevant links about how to switch from Linux to Windows, or why Windows was so much better than Linux. Hmm. Granted, the results have improved dramatically in the past few months, but I suspect that has more to do with the fact that Microsoft is interested in getting into the search game against Google and the other big engines. If there weren't any competition in the search arena, we'd all be living with crappy search results heavily biased towards whichever company was running the show.

Now, back to the topic at hand. a quick search of Google shows some relatively uninteresting results.

This guy Mick Stanic seems to be at least tangentially involved in the industry, but there isn't a lot of new information from him. On the other hand, I learned a lot from this site by Peter Davidson. I haven't actually seen any real E-Ink out in the world yet, but apparently the technology is much further along than I had originally thought.

Another interesting blog by some bloke called Bernie Goldbach in Ireland has an interesting entry about digital signage in supermarkets. One fascinating quote from the article: ...the so-called "last ten feet" to the purchase... is where, according to marketing lore, up to 75 per cent of buying devisions are made and where optimists see the most room for innovation in ways of putting brands before consumers. I'm very curious to see if this "marketing lore" can be backed up with real-world data. WireSpring has a number of customers in Europe and the US trying this sort of application right now, with varying degrees of success, so this article is near to my heart.

That's really it for blogs, though. And all of these were only tangentially concerned with digital signage. Now I did happen to come across a few other interesting articles during my search. this article about digital signage at Washington Mutual Banks mentions a company called Impart, Inc, one of the top-tier content providers for digital signage networks. While the article does mention some of the driving benefits of digital signage systems (like time and place-based advertising, ad tracking, and remote management), absent was any talk of ROI for the systems. One other encouraging quote from this article: CAP Ventures, an independent research firm, projects that industry revenues for the type of dynamic digital signage that Impart provides will rise from $650 million in 2003 to $2.02 billion in 2006.. I think I can live with that