2020 has been a year of important changes for governments, corporations and institutions. For some, its impacts will have traumatic consequences, such as closures of many businesses. For others, this year of change will be the opportunity to develop different projects and important innovations.
The shift from traditional workplaces will have a lasting and profound impact in the ways in which we work with our customers, manage our teams and pilot projects. Since the beginning of March, we have moved our teams at home to ensure their safety. We had to adapt quickly and work in a fully virtual mode.
In the digital signage and interactive terminal sector, we have been able to quickly observe the strength of our partner ecosystems in furniture and display manufacturers as well as for our integration and installation partners. For instance, in only a few weeks, a sanitary terminal 100% made in Quebec was created.
At ITESMEDIA, innovation was always a priority in the way we work. For example, we have pioneered open data integration in the real estate sector with a touchscreen terminal in 2006, in public transit through APIs in 2009 and with KPI displays linked to ERP systems in factories in 2012. In the last 17 years, we have continuously invested important resources to innovate in software development (touchscreens, sensors, LED, RFID, open data through APIs and GTFS-RT) as well as in all other sectors of our organization.
For many years now, our platform integrates the latest HTML5 technologies – we knew that continuing with Flash would keep us from providing innovative solutions tailored to our customers’ needs (read Surviving Adobe Flash Player’s End of Life). Likewise, to meet the growing needs of our important clients and partners from the onset of the pandemic, our teams have worked tirelessly to offer our ITESLIVE digital signage software on most platforms in order to display health measures. Always with helping our customers in mind, we have also taken the initiative of sharing free COVID-19 content.
We then rapidly deployed sits on LG webOS, Samsung Tizen, Android and BrightSign. We even pushed the limits further by offering a 100% web version of our ITESLIVE software. This latest version now lets digital signage network managers share the same information on most of their screens and their sites, as well as on their employees’ mobile phones, tablets and computers, either at work or at home.
To maintain our position as leaders and to meet our clients’ needs, we have implemented a robust “ROADMAP” development plan for the next 24 months. This plan includes, among others, an artificial intelligence component with computer vision for image analysis (this feature will provide a 100% image transmission quality) as well as a motion detection feature which will help prepare for the post-COVID reality when people will be back in hotels and shopping malls.
This is now my seventeenth year in the wonderful world of digital signage. The last year was a bit different and needed some flexibility, but through the efforts of our amazing team, we have been able to innovate even more this year for the benefit of our partners and customers. It couldn’t have been possible without our team, and I wish to thank them.
I would also like to thank our partners and clients; without them, we wouldn’t be able to continue to develop new and exciting projects.
Finally, we wish to thank our readers for their feedback and for sharing our content. We are always available to answer your questions and to work with you in your digital signage projects.