ecommercedirectory

By 2014 I had worked on audio & video products for over 20 years. I started in the early 90s with developments on digital HDTV. I became the first developer at the company I worked for back then in Europe doing video coding since my engineering thesis happened to be on video compression.
When Texas Instruments hired me as a systems engineer for their video chips in 1998 and I came to the US to work for them in Dallas, computer monitors were moving from CRTs to LCD monitors and I worked on components for those. In the 2000s I moved to TV tuners and in the 2nd half of the decade on touch screen controllers for the exploding smartphone market.

Fast-forward to 2015. I go to a store, I still see ads on digital signage for products that don't really interest me - it's a playlist that just loops over and over...
Some forward looking retail outlets start installing 'endless aisle' screens. But when I want to place an order I still have to ask a store associate. When I go to pickup a sandwich for lunch, I still have to stand in line. Why is there no solution that can 'sense' I'm there and show me products, either on my phone or on a display, based on my past purchases, so I can order right away and skip the line?

From my work on touchscreen components, I know that touchscreens become very expensive at any screen size above tablet. And we all have a perfect touchscreen always with us, in our phone, and it even knows our identity and stores our credit card information. So why not use a regular display for interactivity if we can interact with it from our phone?

At the same time the value-add in signage started shifting from hardware to software, since display technology has advanced to the point that pretty much all displays look great.

On mobile, some were using location-based apps that just sent notifications to phones - a point solution and not really integrated with the rest of the ecosystem. Some are doing low-cost digital signage, but still playlist-driven. Some are doing sales analytics or foot traffic monitoring.

But no-one is having a solution that blends the latest mobile, sensor and display technologies in a smart and cost-effective way. In some cases that was clearly because incumbent companies had no reason to disrupt their own lucrative business!

That's the idea for Sophatar, a sophisticated avatar that analyzes sales and presence data; that interacts with your phone when you're not at any participating business location, and with large signage screens when you're on-premise for a more engaging experience. Better for physical businesses to increase customer engagement as e-commerce competition becomes more ferocious.
And then offer all this as a SaaS platform that you can pick from and build on, hardware agnostic and cost-effective, so we can quickly customize and integrate.