Intuiface and invidis Consulting developed the Digital Interactivity Landscape, a globally comprehensive list of CMS-neutral vendors providing technology that can trigger a response in Digital Signage and DooH content. We interview Geoff Bessin, CMO of Intuiface, about this tool. At the bottom of this article is a video about the tool.
- Geoff, can you tell us about the genesis of this project and what motivated Intuiface and invidis to create this report?
We’ve lost count of how often Intuiface has been asked to share a shortlist of vendors supplying human-machine interaction technology like touch screens, RFID readers, environmental sensors, and the like. It’s a perfectly legitimate question that, surprisingly, had no industry resource providing a comprehensive, up-to-the-minute answer. We have a good relationship with invidis, the Munich-based DooH consulting and research firm, so we came to them one day and said, “If you know of a vendor list, please point us to it. If not, how about we create one ourselves?” Well, with our Digital Interactivity Landscape, the industry now has one.
- There seem to be a lot of options for end users and service providers to choose from. How did you segment the groups of technology?
Our first step was to insist that all vendors must be CMS-neutral. Any solution forcing the adoption of a particular CMS – though possibly quite good at what it does – wouldn’t be listed. Then we sat down and thought about the various types of interactivity requested and/or deployed by Intuiface customers. With Intuiface specializing in place-based digital interactivity, we believe we’re well positioned to come across what both the innovators and late adopters are doing. The result is our current list of nine technology categories.
- Did anything surprise you putting together the list and graphic together?
We were struck by the modest number of players in each category, outside of Workflow Automation which – as a pure software play – had a multitude of me-too vendors. Otherwise, the number of participants was actually quite manageable for someone shopping around, even for the various manufacturers of touch technology. We’ve still captured more than 130 companies, and – in the downloadable PDF – hyperlinked each logo to the associated homepage to streamline research, but if you told us at the beginning that we’d find a lot more, we wouldn’t have been surprised.
- Is this a dynamic list? OR How do companies who wish to be included contact you?
We made sure to save our list to a PDF and not to stone because we expect new categories to arise, not to mention new players in each field. In fact, there have already been a couple of revisions since our initial launch because, frankly, we missed some companies. Our goal is to update the poster on an as-needed basis, so consumers should bookmark its landing page. (We’ve also date-stamped the poster, making it easy to know if you have the latest.) Contributions are encouraged and should be sent to landscape@intuiface.com or info@invidis.de.
