As I write this, I’m still a bit dizzy — and with a bit of déjà vu — having just finished chairing the judging for the 2008 DIGI Awards.
Déjà vu all over again as Yogi Berra would say, because we recognized and rewarded the first batch of '08 winners at the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas last February.
Can’t get too much of a good thing — it’s true. But we’ve now launched a new platform for our industry-gold-standard DIGI Awards. NewBay Media together with the Digital Signage Group presented the “new” DIGI Awards at The Digital Signage Show held at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, October 15-16. And because we’ve moved the home of the DIGI Awards from a spring to a fall schedule, we are restarting the cycle with a whole new DIGI Awards program this year, instead of waiting for fall '09. And, importantly, we’ve now added ‘best product’ categories to the DIGI Awards, to reward innovation in product design for digital signage hardware, software, and peripherals.
The DIGI Awards are the Digital Signage Industry’s Premier Awards program, recognizing the resellers, integrators and service providers who have used their expertise to exceed the expectations of clients, as well as the industry itself. The winning entries were recognized and awarded at the Digital Signage Show New York.
As we re-launch the DIGI Awards, it’s very gratifying that we’ve just received a record number of entries, and in addition to introducing New Product categories to reflect the growing sophistication of display, software, and other products in the booming digital signage market, we’ve simplified the application categories. The bottom line: you’ll see in the winners the most successful and innovative digital signage deployments that have taken place from 2007 to August 2008.
The Digital Signage Show New York is co-located with KioskCom Self Service Expo, covering all customer-facing technologies. Attendees discover how they can succeed by deploying digital signage alone or as an integrated multi-channel program. To register for The Digital Signage Show New York, visit www.thedigitalsignageshow.com
- In this issue, I’m particularly pleased with our guest article on the next-gen digital signage content management software that’s being developed for this industry. Jeff Collard of Omnivex, who is a regular on top-level Software panels at the major trade shows and conferences, explains how we need to get beyond “content as king” to a new paradigm where content adjusts to context. In other words, real time digital messaging, that’s keyed to and responds to changing audience conditions and audience cues. It’s an intriguing future — that’s here now. And it’s the place where software and content wanna-be’s are separated from the true innovators of content management.
