My team and I were surprised at the number of vendors in the software sector who did not attend the excellent 4th OVAB Europe Digital Signage Conference [1] – this after all is pretty much an event for them and they are supposed to be part of the industry.
[2]BroadSign, Harris, Signagelive go head to head
As a presenter there’s nothing better I feel than being able to shout out to folks in the audience (and get them involved) when doing your own presentation. During my wrap-up [3] I of course made mention of many software vendors but I could only do actual shout outs to BroadSign, Harris and signagelive who were the only ones in our #DSTop10 [4] or of note who were there (I have subsequently been told that at least 4 people from Cisco had registered for the conference and were in attendance).
Having said that it was great to see the people from Mermaid [5] at the conference – the guys collared me and took me to task over a couple of things we had written and not written: “do you know how big we are?” and “I can’t tell you officially but watch out for …” are worth their weight in gold and we’d like to think that 10 minutes face to face with us is worth attending a conference like this for on its own.
For all those vendors who email us and ask “how can we get in your #DSTop10?” – attending the best events, sharing your wisdom, having genuine visibility in the industry and talking to us and others is a damn good place to start.
We appreciate that travel, conference and event budgets are not infinite but we do try to help by pointing out and highlighting the events that are good and those that are bad and usually we are pretty much spot on. Our Travelogue gives you some indication of what we like and where we will be.
Nota bene: we are starting to pull together our 2011 Travelogue which you can see here [6].
So from a software vendor perspective here are our Heroes and Zeroes: –
Heroes (in alphabetical order)
- Ayuda Media Systems (sort of newcomer as they are not a pure play software vendor but we know that we will hear from more them in the future – especially if some of the rumours are true about announcements around next week’s DPAA event [7]). Their CEO Andreas Soupliotis is an ex-Microsoft .net evangelist and as attendees at the conference heard yesterday he has a lot of valuable things to say about the software industry
- BroadSign travel widely, always happy to sponsor events, always take part, 10/10 – its always good catching up with Brian and Nurlan
- Bryan Crotaz – many in the UK will know Bryan for building up and selling Inspired Signage to AMX. Now doing another startup. Very clever chap and good to see him participating at his own expense at events.
- Harris Broadcast – Ian and his team seem to be spending more time at events. Fantastic
- Mermaid technology a/s – big hats off for attending and briefing us. You have gone up in our estimation
- signagelive – Jason is a great speaker, always entertaining, always willing to share, discuss and debate
Zeroes (in alphabetical order)
- C-nario missed the opportunity perhaps to introduce a nicer side (there is a play on words there if you know what to look for) and introduce to the world their new CEO (yes they have a new CEO). Guys you gotta get to these sorts of events – perhaps though now you have lost JCDecaux to BroadSign you have lost the will to do so?
- CoolSign who made a lot of noise to us recently about Europe are obviously not the least serious about the region if they can’t be arsed to get on a plane to Europe or send their guy in Amsterdam or worse case scenario one of their VARs to the event.
- Dynamax
- One of EnQii’s chief investors, Wellington, is even based in Munich so it doesn’t seem like it would have been too much trouble to attend
- Via email, Navori probably shout the loudest about our #DSTop10 but obviously can’t be arsed to travel the 591 km from Geneva to Munich
- With 40% of their business now supposedly international and a desire to reach further afield than their niche in Education we were somewhat surprised that ONELAN weren’t there
- Scala (who as members of OVAB Europe could have attended the conference for free) weren’t there – a big bad and crazy, crazy! We have a LOT of time for Jeff Porter at Scala, why the hell isn’t he up there on stage doing what Andreas Soupliotis does for Ayuda? Jeff has so much to share, so much he can offer
- We wouldn’t have thought it that difficult for STRATACACHE’s one man in London to fly over
DiSCO is the next conference being arranged by the dynamic duo [8] the day before #ISEUROPE in Amsterdam on January 31st and we hope for a better turnout.