Interview with NoviSign’s CEO – what is digital signage?

Q: Hello Gil, it is great to speak to you today, how are you?
A: I’m good, thanks. Happy to be here!

Q: Let’s jump right in: your company (Gil is CEO and Co-Founder of NoviSign), is providing Digital Signage Software over the cloud. What is Digital Signage?
A: Digital Signage started as the digital evolution of the traditional ‘physical signage’, but the technology, combining network, software, hardware and IoT capabilities, has become so much more than that. Digital Signage started as a dynamic sign that, using the right software, can be easily designed and managed from anywhere at any time and evolved dramatically into a powerful interactive marketing and engagement tool.
To summarize – any screen that can be controlled and managed, so it will present the desired content, is digital signage. But modern digital signage is a screen that actually interact with the environment and autonomously responds to external events, impacted by users or any other events.

Q: How do you see the Digital signage business today, and going forward?
A: I see great many things happening in this industry. When we started the business, we were concerned from the potential growth. The implementations and deployment of digital signage, back then, were expensive, heavy and took weeks, if not months. Our concerns disappeared in the last 5 years where we see a general growth in all parameters – H/W offerings, software companies, AV integrator and a tangible growth in demand. The costs of all the ingredients across all the steps of deployment had dropped (H/W, network, SaaS based digital signage software, integration), allowing new type (and size) of customers to follow the footsteps of the big retails and corporates to implement effective digital signage networks. The future indeed looks bright, after few years that we weren’t so sure this would be the case.

Q: Can you identify the growing domains?
A: It is not a definite answer, as I believe the market is growing across all domains (and new domains are added by the day), but we see clearly growth in Healthcare, Education, QSR (Menu boards) and Internal Communication. Another area that we are seriously looking into is the Digital Signage advertisement networks. These ad networks were failing, few years back, and recently we hear about more and more success stories in this intriguing market. We are considering investing more in this area to enable easier, more effective and automatized solution for these networks.

Q: Where do you see NoviSign in 5 years?
A: NoviSign, like any other software company must re-invent itself every now and then. In the longer term, we would like to see ourselves as a digital signage platform for partners and customers from almost any domain and vertical. We are investing in IoT capabilities, increasing our interactions with external devices and systems. We will be supporting ad networks from one hand and will be open for external contributions to our platform, using the power of the community. There is lots to do, 5 years suddenly looks around the corner…

Q: Anything before we wrap up?
A: Happy new year to all, let’s all keep running successful, yet fair and honest business!

Avi.