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Google enters digital signage space, Sony bows to Kobo

by — Feb 18 '14

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Every Monday, CommerceLab brings you a roundup of all the gamification, user experience and interactive display news that’s fit to print. (Or the stuff we liked best, anyway.)

South of the border, at this year’s Digital Signage Expo, Intel’s Jose Avalos let slip that all-things-internet giant Google – and it’s Chromeboxes – will turn its eye to digital signage. Chromeboxes, according to Google’s Rajen Sheth, director of product management, “could become very inexpensive digital signage media players.”

And in other Google news, Waterloo’s Communitech announced it’s now accepting applications for the Entrepreneur’s Demo Day at Google in Silicon Valley. If you have a digital signage product, now may be the moment you’ve been waiting for!

In non-Google-related news, International Data Corp. Canada (IDC Canada) is reporting that 49 per cent of Canadians will eschew their living rooms to watch the Games from the comfort of their smartphones. The majority are using their devices to grab quick updates, while 19 per cent are using their devices to watch highlights and 11 per cent say they’ll also use their device to watch live events. These stats mark a significant move away from consuming live television events, and should open up new ways for companies to interact and engage with sports fans.

Canada’s digital reader Kobo claimed a market victory this week when Sony announced that it was removing itself from the digital reader market and handing over all its users to the Toronto-based digital reader. While no financials of the deal were released, Kobo has 18 million active users with access to 4 million ebook titles.

Finally, if you fancy yourself a Bruce Lee of User Experience, you may want to read UX the Bruce Lee Way, offering up such design nuggets from the martial artist as “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water… Go and be water, my friend.”

 

The CommerceLab

CommerceLab is an interactive place to share cutting-edge digital media research and commercialization in Canada. We connect the business and academic worlds with the information they need to be competitive, to grow, and to compete on a global scale.

  • http://www.fourwindsinteractive.com/ FWiDigitalSigns

    There is no denying that the world is hungry for more screens, in more places, delivering more information, so it’s hard not to see easy-to-use, cheap alternatives to the high-end digital signage products that are alive and operating today. The question is whether or not this alternative does the trick from the first strike or will it disappoint out of the gate and turn users off for a while longer? While we (Four Winds Interactive) hope for broader and deeper success in the digital signage industry, we have some doubts that this first big iteration moves this industry forward. Best of luck.