HOT or NOT – The Top Ten Lists Of 2009
There seem to be so many sites and people promoting their list of top 10’s this year – who will be the first do you think to do a top ten of the top tens?
These lists range from the ridiculous (International Man of Mystery’s misguided predictions on Digital Signage Today immediately springs to mind) that readers can easily ignore to the educated (Gary Kayye’s ‘Kayye’s Krystal Ball: 2010 Edition‘ which is definitely well worth a read for those more interested in AV – even though we don’t think Gary understands why VUKUNET doesn’t have a snowball in hell’s chance of ever working!).
We of course do our own bit to add to the glut of top ten lists each year – whilst not exactly a simple 1 to 10 list, posts like ‘Ten Companies to Watch in 2008‘ and ‘Ten Companies to Watch in 2009‘ are designed to help readers pinpoint companies that we think will have an impact on the industry in the following year.
In our follow up Hot or Not post for 2008 you can see that we definitely got three companies wrong: AdWalker, Screen Technology and MultiQ were far from hot in 2008 (the first two of those going Tango Uniform) whilst the latter failed (in our opinion) to make any impact on the retail sector with what was, back then a relatively unique and quite nice all in one screen / POS / signage solution!
Looking at our 2009 list of companies to watch though (Adflow Networks, Can Media, Christie Digital, Cityscape Media, ContinuumMobile, Eye Corporation, GestureTek, never.no, OVAB and Scala) and we think we did quite well – in terms of HOT or NOT there was only one real blooper and that was ContinuumMobile, who’s co-founder folded himself into CoolSign rather than continue to tread the entrepreneurial path.
As usual though with lists and predictions (though the compilers of said lists rarely tell you this) it’s what is left off rather than what is included!
For example in our list for 2009 where’s Amscreen? Like them (or their products) or not they (Amscreen) have had a profound affect on the signage business in the UK in 2009.
December 31st, 2009 at 16:03 @710
International man of mystery recently ANNOUNCED his company running in stealth mode – brilliant! This guy also thinks no one was using using cellular technology as infrastructure for digital signage before their sign in a box – idiots!