We went along to the Retail Digital Signage Expo in London. This is a small show that is run alongside the Retail Technology Show and a Retail Design Show (shopfitting). In previous years, it was a smaller area up in the balcony area, but this year was much larger than before. Although it was a bigger show, when we visited, early on, visitors were not very plentiful and exhibitors were not terribly impressed. However, it was early in the show and visitors might have been focusing first on the Technology area, which was dominated by payment systems and POS suppliers. One of the strengths of the show in the past has been the high quality of visitors.
One of the comments that we heard was that there were visitors from quite a few countries and several mentioned a number of Portugese visitors, but we couldn’t find why this should be the case!
HP and Lenovo (with support from Intel) were on the show floor, but didn’t have much that was new or specific to the show, although HP has a range of POS system units. The company was also showing VR being used in retail for use as a configurator or to show hotels and other holiday destinations – a clear application for VR.
Because the show sits between ISE/DSE and Infocomm, there was little new product technology from major brands, but we caught up with local integrators and got some of the gossip! However, after Matt’s substantial report on NRF, there was not a lot of ‘hard news’.
