I am a speaker in what’s been billed an “Interactive Shootout” at 9.00 am, Thursday March 8th at DSE.

Details here

The fight debate will take a deeper look at the realities of interactive technologies and will (if I’m anything to do with it) cut the crap to expose the good bad and ugly.

This will be a no pitch zone, warts ‘n all, crash course for the red hot area of how adding the words “mobile” “social” or “local” to DOOH, might or might not mean a damn.

To help expose the BS and provide an engaging and provocative learning experience, I will be joined by two of the brightest and non-BS people in our industry - David Haynes (Sixteen:Nine blog, pressDOOH and The Preset Group) and David Weinfeld (Digital Signage Insights blog and CSO at Screenreach).

David Weinfeld and I will take opposing sides of each question lobbed at us by Mr Haynes - we may not even know which side we’ll be asked to take until Mr Haynes directs us - that way, the audience will gain perspective into the pros and cons of otherwise hyped areas of our industry.

I’m confident that attendees will leave with a rounder sense of the challenges and opportunities - rather than a sales pitch. And if we can save anyone from getting at any of the war wounds that we have got in the past 10+ years of DOOH, then it’ll be time well spent.

Hope to see you there.

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When LocaModa launched Wiffiti some 4 years ago, it was designed as an engagement tool for audiences to express themselves on screens at events or venues.

Wiffiti continues to serve us well and has been used in several hundred campaigns (with brands such as Pepsi, Coke, Verizon, GM etc) political events (such as a fund raiser for the then presidential candidate Barack Obama) and events/concerts (including major trade shows such as CES, American Idol tours and the Black Eyed Peas).

But a strange thing started to happen about 18 months ago.

Where LocaModa was focused on monetizing media on digital out-of-home screens, our platform unpredicatbly started to be embraced by teachers.

Like brands, teachers realized that their “audience” wasn’t always paying attention! Instead of telling their pupils to turn their phones off, enterprising teachers recognized the potential to use the phone as an engagement tool and communication channel.

What may well have started out as a “cool” idea or gimmick worked, and soon we saw tens of thousands of screens being made by users who were not exactly LocaModa’s target customers.

Today over 90,000 Wiffiti applications have been made by teachers.

Scolastic even published a lesson on text messaging in class via Wiffiti.

And that is why we not only had to listen to the wisdom of the crowd, but also work out where new markets for Wiffiti could be.

So today at Wiffiti.com, there is an invitation to a beta program that is being rolled out in the coming weeks to the many thousands of teachers, event/conference organizers and smaller digital networks who have been outside our core market.

The key features that teachers have been asking for have previously only been available to customers paying many thousands of dollars - but those features including the ability for a screen to be private and moderation tools, will soon be available to a much wider group of users.

And for event/conference organizers, who need more flexibility to customize screens to market to their audiences, there will be affordable Wiffiti Pro versions.

Our media clients and digital networks have a very different set of requirements for customized campaigns and/or hundreds or thousands of localized nodes, and these clients will be unaffected by the changes going on with Wiffiti. They will soon be offered a range of applications and features more easily tailored to their specific requirements.

So stay tuned - and if you want an invite to the Wiffiti beta program, you can get one here.

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