Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark Podcast Por Sixteen:Nine arte de portada

Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

De: Sixteen:Nine
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 This digital signage podcast is the audio extension of Sixteen:Nine, an online publication that's been documenting the growth and filtering the BS of the digital signage industry since 2006.Copyright 2020. All rights reserved. Economía
Episodios
  • Dave Haynes - The Exit Interview With Invidis

    Dave Haynes - The Exit Interview With Invidis
    May 26 2025
    The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT This podcast is a bit different, as I am on the other side of the interview table - answering questions instead of asking them. That's because this is the last Sixteen:Nine podcast with me as the host. I've been doing Sixteen:Nine for almost 20 years, and the podcast version for the last nine. I'm retiring. I'm 67 and it is time to slow the hell down. I'm not leaving the industry, entirely. Just dialing back to a few side hustle gigs and other work, working more when the weather gets cold in my part of the world and I'm looking for distractions and extra money that will get Joy and I away from that cold weather for a bit. Think of this as my exit interview, done with my friends in Munich at invidis, who have been longtime content partners and will now edit and manage Sixteen:Nine. This makes me happy, as I didn't want to just stop what I think is a valued part of this business. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Balthasar Mayer: Welcome to the Sixteen:Nine podcast. This is Balthasar Mayer. Antonia Hamberger: This is Antonia Hamberger. Balthasar Mayer: We have a very special guest today. He is the bullshit filter of the digital signage industry. He's the head, heart, and driving force behind Sixteen:Nine, one of the rare people who manages to produce a trade publication that makes you laugh and gives you something to learn at the same time. He also keeps the digital signage industry with his beloved industry mixes at trade shows, and he's never afraid to cut through marketing fluff and speak his mind and now he's retiring, and we are very happy to have him here on the podcast. Welcome, Dave Haynes. Thank you. Dave Haynes: Yes, I was joking. This is the exit interview. It's like leaving a company. Antonia Hamberger: It is the exit interview, and we were thinking about just turning things around. Your blog is called Sixteen:Nine, and we're now doing the Nine:Sixteen edition. You'll get nine questions where we just let you ramble on a bit about your career, and then you'll get sixteen questions where you'll give us rapid-fire answers. Dave Haynes: Alright, I'm drinking Vice beer because I'm in Munich so this could get salty by the end of it. Balthasar Mayer: That is our goal to make it salty, and interesting at the same time. Antonia Hamberger: Dave, you've been doing this blog for 20 years. You've been in the industry for even longer than that. So I guess I'm wondering what made you go into digital signage? How did this happen in the first place? Dave Haynes: I was in the newspaper industry. I was a daily newspaper reporter. I started in 1979 at the Winnipeg Free Press, and my first job out of school, working for a newspaper, was covering the rock music scene. So my first three years in the newspaper, I was interviewing rock bands like Billy Joel, Ozzy Osbourne, you name it, back in the early 80s, late 70s, just about anybody who was big at that time. I did an interview with them, which was quite interesting. At times, you would get lovely people and sometimes you'd get absolute a-holes, and everything in between. Antonia Hamberger: Probably also a lot of drunk people, drunk rock stars? Dave Haynes: Ozzy definitely was impaired, and Billy Joel, he stopped in Winnipeg on the first stop on his North American tour back in 1981 or something and he was just off a plane from New York, he and his band, and they had a press event at a Holiday Inn in Winnipeg, and he was very tipsy. He'd been having cocktails all the way from New York. So that was pretty interesting. I've had a number of those kinds of interviews. So anyways, then I continued in newspapers for several years, became an editor, and got bored with being an editor in a market where not a lot of bad things happened, and as a journalist, you're not praying for bad things to happen, but they're much more interesting to write about than calm, stable situation. When the newspaper started talking about doing new media, getting into digital, I stuck my hand up and said, I'll do it. So I took the newspaper online in 1995, one of the first North American papers to go online, and did that for four years and reported directly to the publisher and nobody on the executive team, including the publisher, bought into my concerns that this was going to be a problem for newspapers. They just tended to think this was a passing fancy. It wasn't really gonna happen. So, I just got frustrated and left and weirdly went to work for a company called Elevator News Network that was putting digital screens, LCD panels in elevators, office tower elevators in 1999. Very complicated, very expensive. I started out as the GM for Western Canada, but pretty quickly became Vice President of Operations for the whole show. So I was putting screens in 70-story office towers in the elevator shops, in the shafts, and running all the cabling in the elevator shafts, and very...
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    38 m
  • Gene Hamm, Digichief

    Gene Hamm, Digichief
    May 21 2025
    The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Digichief has been helping digital signage and DOOH network operators feed the so-called content beast for a bunch of years. While the Kentucky-based company started up in 2007, its roots go back another decade to a tech start-up that did similar graphics-driven content work for broadcast TV. I've known co-founder Gene Hamm forever, but this podcast was the first time we had a detailed chat about what Digichief does and offers. We get into a bunch of things, including what's widely used and what seems like perfect contextual content, but hasn't caught on. We talk in detail, as well, about more customized content, and about a new service called Mercury that Digichief spent more than a year developing and recently rolled out. If you hear thumping sounds in the background on my end, that's the roofers. It wasn't until the morning we recorded this that I remembered about the racket they'd be making. Big job. Big bill. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Gene Hamm, thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know much about Digichief, could you gimme the elevator pitch on what you guys do? Gene Hamm: Absolutely. Thanks Dave. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Am I the first one to say that? Probably not, among the first. Gene Hamm: My kids always say I've got a lot of dad jokes, so I oh, no, I won't bore with that. But thanks for having me today. I'm Gene Hamm, one of the founders of Digichief. In a nutshell we're a content solutions provider. Basically, a one-source solution for all things content. We work in a number of capacities. We have a white labeled solution for data feeds for those clients who want to control the designs themselves. Or we can provide an integrated solution with HTML5, our widgets for clients that don't want to do the heavy lifting on the design. We already have it baked into our APIs, and so we've built up a library of content over the years. All the staples, weather news, sports info, that sort of thing. We also have some short-form, video series, and some other products that we work as distribution partners, with digital art, things like that. But in a nutshell, we aggregate, we curate, and we create content for you, and we provide it in a consistent manner. We take care of the licensing, and we keep up with the inevitable changes in the source, data feeds, and put it out in a highly scalable, cloud infrastructure. So I would say in the early days or earlier days of digital signage, a lot of companies, I shouldn't say a lot because there weren't many, and there still aren't that many, but the companies that were doing the sort of work that you do, I would describe as aggregators that they were collecting and harmonizing data feeds from news gathering organizations, government organizations like National Weather Service and so on, and getting in a format that's structured, reliable and all those sorts of things so that CMS companies or end users could tap into your feeds and have something that's reliable, organized, and curated to some degree. Is that a fair way of describing things? Gene Hamm: That is a fair assessment, and I think it's evolved over time. I think early on, it was basically, just kind of an aggregation model. We actually started the company, it's an offshoot of another company we'd started back in the 90s where we worked in the broadcast television space, where we were doing lower third tickers, turnkey systems. So kinda like Chiron? Gene Hamm: Yeah, we were third-party developers for Chiron. So we worked a lot with Chiron early on, but a lot of the stuff you saw on the lower thirds and newscasts around the country was our stuff. The dreaded tickers. Gene Hamm: The dreaded tickers that kind of blew up in the 90s, yeah. We did news headlines, we were doing integrations with AP Weather. We actually ended up doing elections, school closings, and internet chat. We were all over the board on that. So that's how we got our feet wet on integrating and aggregating content. In the mid 2000s, we saw the digital signage kind of take off, and we said, look, we've already got these connections with these sources, so why don't we just license these and license this vertical? So that's kind of how it started, but it's evolved over time. We certainly still do that and provide those in a consistent format, but then it's also moved into kind of bespoke projects where people will say, we've got this data, we've got, we want this, maybe we have to go out and do research on specific topics for “Cold weather starting tips for Automotive Dealerships”, things like that. So there's really a research arm to it that we can go out and create stuff for custom projects. So if you had to give a percentage of from a third party versus what you guys are developing internally, what roughly would that be? Gene Hamm: I would say about 60 to 70% of it is ...
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    37 m
  • Tod Puetz, Insane Impact

    Tod Puetz, Insane Impact
    Apr 30 2025
    The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT If you go to big outdoor sports events, concerts in parks or even political rallies, there's a reasonable chance that what's happening is going to be relayed on a portable LED display that was wheeled into place by trailer. My local footy team uses one and it is old and looks terrible. But that's not the norm, and certainly not for a Des Moines, Iowa company that is very specifically in the business of making and selling great-looking and bulletproof on-the-go LED trailers. Insane Impact has been at it for eight years and now has almost 500 units operating, mostly but not only in the United States. The flagship product is 17 feet wide by 10 feet tall, using 4mm LED and pushing as much as 7,500 nits. It's been designed to roll into place and be up and running in 10 minutes or less - even if a doofus like me was told to get it lit up. I had a really good chat with Tod Puetz, who started the company after first being a user, when he was in the golf equipment business. In this podcast, we get into a lot of things - including how he had the foresight to get ahead of the tariffs turmoil and pre-ordered enough electronics and hardware to hopefully ride out these uncertain months. We also talk about use-cases and probably the most curious application to date - drive-in funerals when COVID was raging. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Tod, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Insane Impact does, where you're based, those kinds of nuts and bolts questions? Tod Puetz: Yeah, appreciate it Dave. Insane Impact, primarily focused on LED as a business, but we are an audio video integration company based out of Des Moines, Iowa. Des Moines. So you're in flyover country? Tod Puetz: Absolutely. It's actually very handy there because you're like two hours away from the East Coast and two hours away from the West coast, right? Tod Puetz: It really is. Just in proximity here in the central part of the US, where our corporate office and warehouse location is about 65 seconds from the airport Des Moines International, so very easy to get in. All the major interstate throwaways between I-29 North and South and I-35 North and South, and then I-80 West. We're pretty much within minutes of getting anywhere we need to go east, west, north, or south. Nice. How long has the company been around? Tod Puetz: We started up in 2015, flipped the switch basically late December, 2015 and have been going rock and roll. So we're coming up on our 10 year anniversary here in December. You are a founder? Tod Puetz: I am, yeah. Founder and CEO. So what compelled you to do this? What did you see in the marketplace that said, okay, this is what I should do? Tod Puetz: Yeah, really the CliffNotes version, my former life was in the golf business. I was a manufacturer sales rep for TaylorMade Golf, and I was introduced to a gentleman here locally in Des Moines that had an older video truck and basically saw an opportunity to utilize that as a sales tool to help me sell more golf clubs. So we took this video truck out on the driving range here locally in Des Moines, hooked it up to the launch monitor and, gosh, that was almost 18 years ago. Back then it was a big deal. Not a lot of people in your run of the mill average daily golfer really ever had an op opportunity to do that. They'd seen it on tour. But we brought the bigs out to the little team here in some of these country clubs, and again, larger than life. They were able to see their stats up on the screen and really fell in love with the technology back then, and were able to utilize that for a number of years after that initial introduction. What was it back then? What was the technology back then, early LED? Tod Puetz: It was an SMD, It was an early 8x8 millimeter SMD back then. I refer to it as antiquated, but back then, it was pretty fresh and new. But yeah, just the idea of being able to drive this thing up to the driving range, the wings folded open on this thing and, within minutes we're plug and play and just really, fell in love with that concept. , Yeah. So did you buy the business from him or just get something going on your own? Tod Puetz: Did not. We utilized them. It was a kind of a one man show there. It was more of a hobby for individuals, and they used it for four or five years. But they weren't interested in scaling this thing. As my career with TaylorMade progressed more and more, I ended up working with other companies, just trying to understand the LED business. So I branched out and helped a few other smaller LED niche companies to try to generate some business in the sports space. We just had a lot of relationships with the golf business and yeah, really just took the concept and I knew there was a different mouse trap here with that type of opportunity to scale it, that's where we started things in late 2015. So the idea is just at ...
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    37 m
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