Our Top 10 Digital Signage Vendors Part 3

Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief

Reasons to be cheerful, 1, 2, 3 ….

We always promised you a part 3 to late last year’s initial post on our take in Europe with the Top 10 Digital Signage Vendors.

For those of you not familiar with it, Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here although such was the interest in the articles you will almost definitely see both of them in our new Most Popular Posts (MPP) table top right hand corner of the blog.

Part 3 is designed to round off the earlier work we did with a brief update on those that never made the top 10 but whom we had initially flagged as perhaps, the “Ones to Watch”.

If you remember at the end of Part 1 we listed in alphabetical order: –

1-2-1View

Hong Kong based with offices in Taipei, Singapore and Salt Lake City / Utah in the US. These folks are making a lot of noise and gaining a lot credibility and awareness. Along with systems deployed in Thailand and Singapore, they have recently deployed a big system in Spain. They have had stand presence at both ISE in Amsterdam and at Screen Expo Europe, London. They launched their 1-2-1Viewer audience measurement system at ISE and this got good reviews at ISE and at Screen Expo. Still no physical office in Europe though.

MediaTile

We weren’t the only ones to recognise someone moving up in the world. MediaTile this year received the 2008 Digital Signage Technology Leadership Award from Frost & Sullivan. They have been busy all over Europe and signed some heavyweight distributors and resellers recently – including BTiG in the UK. That first REALLY big / elusive / reference site rollout has yet to happen but at all the shows their Digital-Sign-in-a-Box concept is being talked about as unique and innovative. Their partners now need to close some sales.

MultiQ

These guys have been very disappointing. They are turning out to be a screen manufacturer that doesn’t quite get digital signage (and unfortunately there are lots and lots of those around at the moment) as opposed to the one that we thought was actually at the forefront of (understanding) screens with embedded intelligence. They avoided ISE and Screen Expo and without a clear message to the industry that might have been sensible. If you want to see them, and if you are in Retail you should because they do have a good product then they will be at EuroShop in Dusseldorf (on the POPAI stand) and are working with Metro Future Stores on a stand at the Retail Solutions show in London in June. These guys already have some fantastic retail brands as customers and we stand by our statement that retailers in essence want to buy screens (with intelligence) rather than digital signage systems per se – MultiQ are in a good position to really do well but must try much harder.


Ryarc Media Systems

What can we say about these folks? We have been really impressed with what we have seen since we first came across them in a number of Indian installs in the middle of last year. They have setup a 5 person office in the Netherlands – having recruited some well known folks from the industry, recruited some good distributors and resellers – not least the Radiant Ireland / Radiant Europe folks and better still have won some impressive pieces of business (including the 110+ Permanent TSB retail bank rollout in Ireland).

We believe they have some even bigger deals in the offing which will be announced before the end of Q1 2008.

Wirespring

Bill Gerba at Wirespring has always been honest with his views on trade shows and so it is no surprise that we haven’t seen (nor probably ever will see) Wirespring at a Kiosk or Digital Signage show in Europe – that’s not to say his distributors won’t though. Whilst Bill doesn’t intend to have a physical European presence himself he does have a strong and very loyal reseller following (people like Frontcast Media in Sweden and Artexe in Italy)

Even these guys (the resellers) like to keep their deployment plans to themselves but we do understand that they have two very large rollouts happening at the moment (just under a thousand each).

The first is purely in Scandinavia and the second is a somewhat pan-European rollout starting in France. They have also been active in Spain with a several hundred venue kiosk network.

Wirespring, similar to the Stratacache’s of the world is one of those quiet technology suppliers, who in actuality have a huge installed presence but either don’t want to or don’t know how to shout about it.


One Response to “Our Top 10 Digital Signage Vendors Part 3”

  1. Bill Gerba Says:

    Thanks for the nice writeup, Adrian. You can probably guess that I’ve never been known as either quiet or reserved, so you can bet it’s more of the former than the latter 😉

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