Here’s What Intel Should Do…

Today in Lost Wages, a 22 year veteran of the chipmaking business, and a man who says three dozen words when one will do, will give a ‘keynote breakfast’ at #dse2014.

^[1]

Jose Avalos

Jose Avalos who, having never worked in the retail sector, describes himself ^[2] as a ‘Retail industry strategist for all things visual retail and customer experience’ will present ‘Digital Signage Futurecasting: Insights & Predictions ^[3]‘.

We’ve heard Jose speak many times before and quite simply, he’s not particularly good, either in his delivery or in the subject matter itself. Ask most people in the industry how credible a chipmaker not playing in ARM or a software vendor focused on Windows ^[4], can in any sense of the word be seen as a ‘futurecaster’?

You’d think then that he was a strange choice for a keynote – unless of course you were to think that Intel being a major sponsor and exhibitor of DSE ^[5] had anything to do with it.

Here’s where we fall out with the organisers of DSE, who (apart from still needing to tweak their education sessions – giving them more meat, less Bunn and absolutely no pratts) do a very good job of putting together the world’s leading event for digital signage.

Intel’s role in the digital signage and digital out of home world could be a simple (and yet very powerful) one: –

• Pick a side in the DSA vs DSF debate ^[6]
• Stay out of digital signage software
• Pump your marketing dollars into open source initiatives ^[7] to solve known industry problems
• Pay independent contractors to write code (see above), don’t employ consultants who tell you how good you are AND don’t waste your money organising wine tasting evenings when you haven’t helped solve one industry problem yet
• Breathe the life back into OPS (this IPSS thing just sounds plain ridiculous ^[8])
• Worry about low cost chips – cos’ quite frankly that should be your biggest worry!

Let me predict one thing. Jose’s keynote next Wednesday will be awful. There will be no insight and his predictions (if there are any serious predictions) will count for nothing.

There are dozens of other speakers better qualified to keynote and if DSE is to continually improve itself (as it usually does) it needs to think carefully about who, in future, it chooses to speak.