LocaModa’s social calendar is filling up fast. Here’s a quick round-up of upcoming highlights:
And finally, we’re on board with the MSG Entertainment’s major Foursquare SWARM event in NYC on May 13th. If you’ll be in NYC, register! And if you need a lure other than open bars, we’ll be there (and so will our screens)!
A fantastic conversation has taken shape on the #screenmediaexpo group on LinkedIn, focusing around the current climate of interactive digital signage, expectations for the future, and the merits of integrating interactive DOOH with operational management systems (e.g. POS) contrasted with cross-channel brand awareness campaigns and their (perhaps) more organic sense of user engagement.
(Note: Making that last sentence non-partisan has caused me to break into a legitimate sweat.)
This discussion begins to pull back the curtain for a set of keynotes at the Screenmedia Expo Europe, held in London’s Earl’s Court on May 5-6th, one of which will be delivered by LocaModa’s own Stephen Randall, and the other by Symon’s VP of Biz Dev, Steve Gurley.
If you’re in the DOOH space and not a member of the #screenmediaexpo group, get on it!
And if you are… hop on the discussion thread and prepare to be amazed at the respect and neutrality of all of the contributors. It’s an encouragingly open conversation for the DOOH industry, particularly in its finessing of the oftentimes contentious subject of defining value within an interactive play across all relevant parties – end user, venue, OS, network, brand.
Next Tuesday, April 13th, LocaModa CEO Stephen Randall will be speaking at the Digital Signage Content Strategies Summit, hosted by the Strategy Institute. His presentation, entitled Interoperability with Mobile and Social Media: Successful Multi-Channel Campaigns with Digital Out of Home Media will focus on raising audience connectivity to new levels by utilizing a place-based social media platform.
Stephen’s recent white paper, Increasing the Value of a Digital Out of Home Network Via Metcalfe’s Law, lays the groundwork for his method of increasing a venue’s or campaign’s “connectivity score.”
I’ll tease you with the first five steps in the equation, and will follow up after Stephen’s presentation with the final five tenets (you can’t give away all of your cookies before the bake sale!):
1. Your network is connected to the web
2. Dynamic media supports local/topical tags
3. Media is multi-network
4. Mobile is more than a text CTA
5. Screens react (interact) in real time to end users
Hope to see many of you at the Summit, and look for the entire presentation to be posted on SlideShare after the event.
Although many of the posts here on The Web Outside showcase LocaModa’s finished products, I thought it would be a nice change of pace to pass the baton over to one of our developers and let him shed a bit of light on what goes on behind the scenes here.
Ben, a Platform Architect here at LocaModa, has written a two-part blog post in which he details the asynchronous sending and receiving of messages, as well as synchronous request/response using ActiveMQ and Spring.
Ben will be representing Loca at SXSW, so feel free to pick his brain in person if you’re headed to Austin. (He looks basically like the profile pic above, except in color.) If not, you can always hit him up on Twitter or leave a comment here.
The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high. ~Norman Mailer
And with that, I’m turning the blog over to CEO Stephen Randall today for his take on this past week in Loca-Land. Take it away, Stephen…
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Following DSE 2010 in Vegas, the LocaModa train keeps rolling along…
We used DSE as a platform to launch the industry’s first app store – dedicated to solving the problem of helping networks find revenue generating media that engages audiences, attracts advertisers and adds value to venues.
I’m happy to say that our message and proposition was received loud and clear! It’s great to see so many companies coming over to our booth and telling us that we had the exact solution they were looking for. I was also delighted to see so many inquiries coming from major networks outside the US.
We also announced our relationship and integration with Foursquare.
The Foursquare announcement was timed to coincide with our launch on another Clear Channel screen – this one happens to be the largest on the strip, outside Miracle Mile Shops. This was great timing with the DSE show less than one mile away, and various events occurring at the Paris, next to the screen. This story keeps on getting bigger for good reason. Applications like Foursquare will become the on-ramp for loyalty programs in venues and are perfect for DOOH screens. Not surprising then that both Techcrunch and Mashable covered it yesterday afternoon. You should have seen our web stats spike!
Back to DSE, where we also announced that UCView has integrated LocaModa Apps directly into their software offering (they have hundreds of licensees collectively reaching thousands of locations).
The show itself was a great success with hundreds of leads from networks globally representing tens of thousands of venues. Our booth was always well attended and our applications were also on display at UCView, Eventful and CoolSign booths, as well as being used by the event organizers as a communications tool, showing tweets, hashtags and text messages from attendees.
LocaModa’s position as thought leaders was further strengthened when it was announced that we had won two gold awards for our work – a Gold Apex award in the Hospitality category and a Gold Content award in the Interactive category. Both awards were for applications that ran on Zoom Media and Marketing’s network – which was also great news for our partners.
Luckily we managed to fly back to Boston missing the massive Nor’ Easter that dumped 18 inches of snow along the east coast and delayed flights up to New York. We made it back with no delays. Our team was great – Jake, Tim and Gabi were first timers at DSE and now know what it’s like to stand and talk to customers until you don’t have a voice. Jayne, Bill, Steve and I, are long time supporters of DSE so we already knew what to expect – but even we were very surprised by how the event went. Thanks Chris and team over at DSE.
More Vegas photos available on Gabi’s Flickr.
