This is the restaurant technology guys podcast, helping you run your restaurant better.
Before we move forward with the show, I wanted to share about a product that I came across recently. We're in the middle of the summertime. And so you're going through dads and grads and I know the holidays are just as bad. But it's a product that's trying to become the Open Table for large parties. The name is restaurant rent. Nick and his team have created a online booking solution to allow restaurants to book large parties and do them online in such an easy way. It's
a brilliant solution. And having just gone through graduation for my son, I would have loved to have had a solution like this, check out Nick and his solution restaurant when you get a few minutes after the show. Welcome back to the restaurant technology guys podcast. Thank you everyone out there for joining us. As I say each and every time I know that you guys have got hundreds of choices on how you spend your time and
energy online. And we appreciate you hanging with us every week to to learn a little bit more about what we've discovered in the world a restaurant technology. Today is no exception. Today, we are joined by a very special guest who I have had the pleasure to know for some time now. And so I'm excited to introduce Mark to you guys. But Mark, I don't know your story nearly as well as you know your story. So why don't to mark Why don't you introduce
yourself? Who was Mark Rosenberg and then we can talk a little bit about what you get to do every day.
Thanks a lot, Jeremy. Appreciate being on the restaurant technology guys podcast, please. Like and share the video. And if you got any comments, put them in? Yeah, absolutely. Look at you. You're like a you're like a social media guy. I need to I need to hire you out here. Yeah, so my name is Mark Rosenberg. I'm the founder of OSM Solutions. We're a full service digital signage company in Austin, Texas. And we provide solutions for restaurants, primarily digital menu boards.
We do some other signage. In door drive thru, we do direct view LED. And we've, we've been at this. Since 2008, I really, I started doing a digital signage in the infancy of the industry. And it was funny in 2008, a friend of mine in the restaurant business, asked if I could do digital menu boards for him. And being that I'm a creative and very technical. I thought that was very interesting was very much like web development, but
kind of in a closed network. And then, so he had 18 restaurants and needed to remodel one of his restaurants in Los Angeles and get up to speed with with digital because the mall was mandating him to go digital.
Interesting. 1008 2008 Yeah, interesting.
Okay. And he didn't really know how to do that. And there weren't many vendors at the time. So you asked me if I could help and, and I, I was all yours. I thought that was really interesting. So I, the first restaurant we did with with him was using DVDs and televisions because we just didn't have the mature products that we have
today. And so yeah, we put up three TVs and bought three DVD players and I authored the DVD, you know, with the with the graphics files and made into video and put that up and that worked. But then the mall actually contacted me and said that they had another one of their tenants that needed to go digital as well. And they didn't have another vendor. So they asked if I could help that customer. And that ended up being Charlie's Philly steaks, and they have over 500 locations. And so we did that
first one at Topanga Mall. And that was the first location I had figured out that BrightSign was a was a product. Roku had spun off this little company called Bright sign they created a media controller with solid state was it could be connected to the network and it came with some software. And you could author a movie and didn't have to author a DVD which was many steps and problematic and
especially for less cables a lot less Yeah, just a lot less all of that
and connected to the network, which I thought was quite interesting. At first, we just loaded up SD cards on three different players. And then that became the solution. And that worked. That worked really well.
And then we hooked it up to the network and I figured out how to how to surf the data from a little web server and do a networked media player that you You could upload the new video content to and change the menu very easily, which I will my customers, I only have two customers at this point, but I knew that they would want that. And I could see that that was
the future. So using bright sign, I, I got a, I got a couple other customers after that and started to really service the customers by changing the menu for them. I mean, I really wanted my customers to change their own menu, and I kind of saw that as the future. But the truth was that they always just called or emailed me and asked me to make the changes for them. So I was doing that. And the software was was, was okay, but was difficult because it was Windows only and I was on a Mac.
And it just I thought to myself, why isn't this a web application. And after like a couple of years of that I saw how to scale this business was really to have my own content management system. And to be able to offer not only the helpful services, like changing the menu for them, I needed to
make it easier on myself. And then in the future, I wanted my customers to have a really simple system where they could just log in, change the price of the cheeseburger hit submit, the menu would change, and they would walk away and things would be super easy. And that that that would scale. And so in about 2010, I thought of a good name menu board manager and registered that domain and put up a little website and and started to sandbox, this content
management idea. And I got a friend of mine who actually had moved to Israel to help contact him one day and said, Hey, I have this idea to build a content management system for digital signage who you helped me? And he said, Well, I don't know how to do that. But if you pay me to learn, I probably figure it out.
Well, I'd love to mark just because you've been around the space for so long. I mean, in 2008 Most people have a hard time thinking back 15 years, what was the state of digital menus, I mean, it really was like, there might have been some SD cards that went into TVs but like TVs were mean HDMI wasn't even like, technically really adopted and most TVs back
in 2008. So even getting content onto a media player besides the fact that the TVs were twice as heavy as they were and and didn't last as long talk me through kind of I love that I haven't I love hearing founder stories where they they get this problem and then they go dig in. But I'm sure in your world you're like, well in restaurants historically, don't like don't like to pay for these things in
a significant way. And so it's like, you know what, you go to Hollywood, and you go to the Staples Center, and they've got these big digital menu boards that are, you know, really expensive, but they're willing to pay for them. Not necessarily So Charlie sticker in the Topanga Plaza, you know, and so talk me through you in the state of where TVs were and media was and how you would generate media because that's I mean, I think it's even pre Netflix, you know,
streaming stuff. It was pre streaming in general, like nobody was streaming content, it was all on a disk or on something that you had to plug in and, and it would come up.
Yeah, so at the time, televisions did have USB. And I think the majority of people were using USB, they put a JPEG on the USB, and they would call that up on the screen. And that would work on a consumer television. I did notice though, when you did on a consumer TV and didn't want to show a static image. So it would like flip around every couple of minutes or something something disruptive. That wasn't ideal. And I really saw that the future was having a commercial product
commercial display. The first couple of jobs we did use televisions for just didn't have that. Didn't even understand that there were commercial displays for digital signage yet. But actually there were LG had a 47 inch at the time there were Samsung units. I think, you know, NEC and a couple others had had units there. There were very simple commercial displays for digital signage, meaning they were designed to be on 24/7. And they would display a static image, even with a USB.
But as far as content management systems and System on Chip was a long ways away. Yeah, it was it was really the early days where you had to use an external DVD player or shortly after a media player. And so that's the direction we went in.
Yeah, so with that. So going back, you know, 15 years to kind of some of the iterations you talk a little bit more about any TV you buy today, even the least expensive TV have the ability to have a microprocessor inside of them and the Do you have the ability to put stuff on that? Took me through that evolution? And what did that mean for product innovation, and quite frankly, even adoption of everything within your industry, not just what OSM has been able to do.
But across the board, it feels like it's commercialized the ability, and then we can talk about the ways people have made mistakes. And then we can talk about how, you know, how you guys have pivoted from a content management perspective. But I mean, is it true to say all TVs, commercial or industrial grade televisions have some way to display data on them and to display content and to get to them nowadays that you would buy?
Sure, even from the early days, they all had the ability to display content via USB, which is totally fine for like a mom and pop that has one or two locations, and the owners are around. But once you start getting past 10 locations, and you know, they're all over town, or all over the country, that doesn't scale well. And so, you know, we used a bright sign for a couple of years, and exclusively with those players, and we moved to music, commercial display that what
worked pretty well. But in 2012, at the Digital Signage Expo, Samsung announced the Samsung Smart Signage platform, which was a commercial display with System on Chip, meaning that it had basically a web browser in it. And it was very, very
simple. You could just point that that display to a URL, and it would go out to a web server, and it would download images, HTML, video, real basic, CSS, and, and that and that, that storage of that media that it downloaded was ephemeral, meaning you turn the display off that media was gone, you turn it back on and have to connect to the internet again, and download that again, after about a year or so as far as signage evolved, and they then allowed you to actually install a real
application on the device. So, so smart TVs are actually a little bit ahead of the commercial displays. At the time, smart TVs started to ship with applications, like Netflix and stuff. But the commercial
displays do not. When they did, we ported the application that we had built, essentially built a wrapper around it and built an application that would run on that smart Signage platform display, which gave us the best of both worlds US commercial display, with the ability to have a true app, meaning we had access to store the media and local storage. So yeah, the media was playing from internal storage rather than having to be downloaded from the internet. And so things really started to
pick up. The displays were much brighter than a regular TV, they were designed to be on 24/7 data built in three year warranty. And, and there was the support system with Samsung if you had an extended warranty, which they would honor for these commercial displays used as digital signage.
Perfect. Mark, give me just two seconds, I gotta go run and grab something from the other room. I'll be right back. So Mark, you're talking about kind of just the evolution of the tech. And you've talked a lot about, well, not a lot, but you've talked about kind of management of these devices. And I guess even the ways the ID manage them. You talked about the fact that in the past, you'd have this USB device and you'd create an image or you'd create something and you plug it in, and it would
display this picture. But for those that are less familiar with digital signage, I guess, talking about the evolution, because I've seen people put PowerPoints up there, I've seen people put, you know, static images, PDFs, JPEGs. And then, you know, again, it just continues to evolve over the years. But But talk to us about what do you normally see out in the space? And then kind of what makes OSM different as you guys have evolved on the product side?
Yeah, so a digital sign can be as simple as displaying a static image that can be a JPG, for example, a little bit more sophistication would be using a movie, you know, a looping video. And that works great too. But when you want to change elements of the media, for example, a price which might change on a weekly basis these days with supply chain issues, and the varying different costs, like fluctuating, you might want to
change that quite often. And going back to a graphic file where or a video file can be a lot more complicated and you may need to engage an expensive designer just to change prices. So many board managers evolution was At first, it was just an image or video. But very quickly, I recognized that dynamic text was a crucial component of creating a presentation that would scale to
multiple locations. Because a restaurant might have the same menu at 10 different locations, or 1000 different locations, but prices would be different at every one. And so the way that restaurants roll out menus, like on a seasonal basis, they're usually deploying the same menu to all the locations, but they
want localized pricing. And so creating the background image or video, but then leaving the prices to be dynamic was a game changer, because it makes it very efficient to like, roll out the same menu to all the locations, but then have each location give the each location the ability to log in, and just type in the prices. And then the prices would update on the menu for that location.
Well, and in a world where people are not using digital signs, digital signage, or digital menu boards, right now, that's oftentimes one of their inabilities to change
things. I'm sure we've all been into places where somebody's gotten up on a chair, and then scratched out a price and written a new price with a sharpie, I guess, talk me through what you guys are seeing even when you're going into these deployments that haven't had digital menu boards, is that still the way they're doing them as they're ordering from this printing companies and posting them up there, and they just take forever to get produced
and, and updated. And such as that kind of is that kind of what you guys are experiencing? When you guys are going in and talking to people?
Yes, so I see a lot of tape over, you know, items that are not available. or changing a price by putting a piece of white tape or writing a new price on there, which doesn't look great. You know, your menus, your most important marketing tool in a restaurant, especially at a QSR. So having, you know, things like that really detract from the quality of the brand. And having a digital solution solves all
that. Okay. So when you have print menus, and you want to make a change, well, you've got to go back to your designer to have them make the change, and then you've got to send that over to the print shop, and then the print shops got to then print it. And then they got to FedEx it out. And then when it gets to the shop, the manager has got to be there, receive it, climb up on a ladder, and change out the menu, which there's
many, many steps there. And the there's liability of having your store manager have to climb up there and, and do all that stuff. When you have digital, that all goes away, it's a lot more elegant. And from what my customers have told me. The cost is less. And that certainly the the trouble of making the changes is significantly less. And having the store manager focus on managing the store and selling more food, instead of messing with menus is always more desirable.
Yeah, well, and I'd love to have you talk a little bit about kind of, oftentimes, I think what what people what prevents people from moving forward with solutions such as yours and others that you compete with out in the market spaces cost, they think, you know, they think it's Oh, it's gonna be too expensive. I've already got these menus up
here. But talk me through the value proposition because one product has gotten less expensive, wireless is more reliable than it ever has been, you know, outside of the value of these things, which we'll talk about here in a little bit, when you integrate POS and you talk about being able to manage it from a central location, to full motion video and all of those which I want to get into
before we get done. But But I think a lot of people when they hear about digital menu boards or digital signage they got I can't afford that it's gonna be too expensive. When you talk with your customers, you just said it. They're saying it's less expensive. How is it less expensive than the printed? Printed units? Is it you know, is that the upfront cost? Is it just the ongoing maintenance costs? Talk to me a little bit about that.
Yeah, certainly menu changes are less expensive and more convenient. With digital menus, you always have an upfront cost because you have the equipment that you have to purchase in, have it installed. So there are certainly more upfront costs. But we do have a leasing partner that can really smooth that out and make the cost of entering into the digital menu board realm much more affordable over the long
term. I think over the course of the life of the product, it's probably still a bit more expensive, but it really elevates your brand and makes it more convenient, which you know if a restaurant can present its products, move people through the queue faster and make critical changes to the menu when they need to the operational throughput of the restaurant is going to improve, which I think makes the restaurant more money. And therefore the ROI on digital menu boards becomes pretty apparent.
Yeah, and we'll talk a little bit about the benefits mark, because I think there's a lot there. But I'd love to understand a little bit because in a static menu board, you have static, there is no dynamic anything. There's no dynamic price. And when I say dynamic price, I'm talking about even changing prices during menu changes, or doing changing prices during the supply chain. You don't have the ability to do
anything with video. Talk to me about some best practices and what people are seeing as far as even using video or using color, you know, high graphic images. And what is that doing for brands not just elevating the brand, but what is it doing for the customer experience?
Right. So I see a brand's first of all, designing the menu so that the right products are in front of the customer at the right time
of day. So during breakfast, you don't show them lunch or dinner items that you're not serving, you show exactly the products that you're selling, which enables you to have utilize the real estate and have the ability to highlight items on your menu that you want to showcase, you know, your top sellers, your high profit items, you can put nice boxes around them, you can create contrast on the menu, you can, for example, show 10 different sandwiches in a video rotation that you wouldn't be
able to show on a static menu, you can have steam coming off of the hot sandwich, you can have cold coming off the ice cream, like steam, or, you know, other dynamic elements like movement that draw the eyes to certain parts of the menu. So with the with those methods, you're able to show your products in a better light. And then you know, at a certain time of day, like let's say 10:30am, the breakfast items that are no longer served come off the menu, and you show
your lunch items. If you have a late night menu, you know you can show the items that you want to make sure you sell before the restaurant closes. So you could have a menu that shows from you know, eight to 11pm. And so with digital, you can schedule all of those changes. And those can be on a rotation. So you always have the right products in front of your customers at the right time.
Yeah, and I hadn't even considered that, quite frankly, it's funny that you brought that up that the fact that you can use the same menu boards and they've been doing it for years in Yemen and even in Drive Thru i There's a drive thru that I frequent that does that it's like I go up breakfast time, it's only the breakfast items that might go in a long time. It's a lunch items, and I hadn't considered that.
But that's in a in a static menu board scenario, you're either physically changing them, which I've seen some brands that, you know, they have them on hooks, and they get up on the stepladder and pull these things down, or you've got the breakfast items, and you have to have it say breakfast items
30am. And then you've got guests satisfaction issues, their work. I know we've done a couple of deployments for some customers use of video, you know, not just this image and I guess it technically it's a video if you've got some kind of gift for something where you've got the hamburger with the steam coming off of it. But how are you? How are you guys? How are people in the digital menu board digital signage world using video within
the restaurant vertical? And I guess what are the benefits of it?
Yeah, so having a little bit of movement on the menu in a crowded space like a food court or airport airports where you have many restaurants in or around or in a food court where you know you're competing with other brands, just having a little bit of movement on the menu maybe the soda bubbles are going up or steam or you know it sandwiches flying out. It's got a nice little label on it. So customers are oh, you know, that's the turkey provolone. That looks great. And they go
straight for that. That's the use of video in that respect, really drives people towards the products that you want to showcase and makes your food look better.
Yeah, I love that, that that concept. Talk to me about drive thru. I know drive thru is an area probably that's had some form of digital communication to the consumer. But last full digital menu boards. They've had static cane menu boards and then they've got an order confirmation board and a lot of a lot of the big brands
nationwide. Talk to me a little bit about the evolution and what you guys are doing in that space and just kind of in that space in general with Dr. Sue because everybody with COVID Every single brand is looking for an end cap with a drive thru or some way to do drive thru but driving throughput we had somebody on the show recently faster lions they deal with all of the things related to increasing throughput, which making sure that people know what menu items are there and
how to get those available is a critical piece of it. Talk to me a little bit about how digital menu boards in a drive thru environment are helping drive behavior and, and increase throughput and, and really market the same way. You know, there was just an article this week with McDonald's is saying the dining room was dead. Like they're opening up stores that don't have dining rooms because everything is coming through dresser coming through digital someone's coming and picking it
up. My local Chick fil A here in Texas for a long time, even after COVID didn't open their dining room because they were like, You know what we've got? We've got drive thru figured out and so talk to me a little bit about how critical drive thru is going to be an RD is and how many board manager can help with that.
Yeah, so digital in the drive thru has come a long way in the last five years. I like before five years ago, we used to have to take a standard indoor display and get the brightest one we could get which is usually under 1000 NIT and put it in an enclosure and in Texas, we had air conditioning and hot hot. Yeah, sorry. For cold we get hot and cold here, you get condensation inside of that enclosure and you get you basically meant menu became
unreadable. So just in the last five years, Samsung has been leading in that innovation where they figured out how to do LCD screens with glass that's bonded to the front of the display. So there's no air between the glass and the LCD, and then they upped the brightness to 2500 nits eventually. I mean initially and then now they're up to 3500 nits brightness. So 10 times brighter than a standard television which can be seen in full sun and does not require an enclosure at all.
It is IP 56 rated it can get snow it can get ice it can get rain in literally there's a Samsung video floating around with like a technician taking a garden hose to the into the to the fans in the back of the unit. And it's just humming away. So
I need one of those for my outdoor kitchen, my altar my ultra patios. Watch it from the pool. But that's a different story. We'll talk about that after the show
for that tip. And so yeah, digital in the drive thru, you have a limited amount of real estate. The drive thru, you've got you know about a maybe 12 foot wide space where the car is sitting at the order position, we usually mount them in portrait, so they're tall on maximum is like putting three screens across. So you have a limited amount of real estate
for your menu. And so with digital having the menu be dynamic and day parting only displaying the right products at the right time, you really can take advantage of single double or triple screen array. And then also many times we put a pre sell board that's like three cars back. So ideally, there would be at least room for five cars and a drive thru. And so when you're when you have a queue and the drive thru, and you have a customer at the order position, three cars back there
at the pre sale board. And the pre sell board can show the current limited time offer. It can show specials it can show messaging, and it also entertains the customers a little bit of infotainment as they're in the drive thru, which that lowers the perception of the wait time. So the customer experiences you know, they drive up to maybe pass the pre sell board up to the order position.
The audio Order Confirmation system then is triggered by vehicle detection, which alerts the attendant inside they they're on the headsets you know, hello welcome to whatever restaurant may take your order.
And they start ordering they're communicating over on the audio system, but they're looking at a digital menu board and hopefully because they saw the pre sell board at prime them to spend less time at order position they already know they saw the chicken sandwich there it looks great on that pre cell board with the steamrolling off of it and the you know, spicy chicken and whatever so that they get to that order position and they're already ready to order where maybe with not not a pre sell or
not a digital pre sell. It would take them more time at the order position. So they're they're making their order. And then now menu board manager is supporting real time order confirmation. Yeah,
that was what that was where I was gonna go is is now you can use that same dynamic like real estate, to not have to have a second board, that's for order confirmation. So walk me through a little bit of that mark, because that's a new a new thing you guys have released.
Right? So the so the order confirmation, it pops up when the order is starting to be keyed into the point of sale. So when the customer makes an order, the attendant typed it in to the PIO to the POS, that pops up a dynamic window, which can be full screen, or it can be part of the screen, whatever, whatever they want, you can stylize that however you want, whatever colors, whatever fonts, and essentially, it it improves
order accuracy. Because the customer sees exactly what's been keyed into the POS, including the item, quantity, price, any components, you know, add ketchup, no, no mustard, you know, double pickles, etc. All those components are shown on the screen. So if there's a problem, you're not addressing that problem at the point where they've got the food in their hand, and you have to remake the food. So I think the buzzword in restaurant technology this year is order accuracy.
And so number one, if it's not the labor problem, that's the number one problem that people are dealing with operationally is get making sure that what the customer ordered is what gets into the bag, whether that's on a digital channel, whether that's in Drive Thru or such. Work, you've talked a little bit about POS integration. And I think that was critical to understand that you can do order confirmation.
And you guys are working on a project with our team related to some some other digital signage. But one of the things that I know goes back to both voter accuracy and guest engagement is things that go out of stock, things that are specials, things that you know, and when you've got a paper menu board, I was just out with my wife, I'm having dinner recently and for somebody's birthday and, and we got paper menus, and we sit down and all the women wanted the fried chicken or whatever, and
then the server comes back. And now she says hey, I'm sorry, we're out of chicken when she delivered the menu, she didn't tell us we were out of brick chicken. And now it takes another five or 10 minutes for them to figure out what they want on the menu and, and it just turns into it to to a problem. And in a paper menu board or in a in a printed menu
board scenario. They don't have a you know, they don't have the ability to do that unless they do that a little piece of paper or something across it or you know, beer word or something along those lines in a digital world. Talk to me a little bit about how you guys deal with both countdowns and then just really stuff that's out of stock until the supply chain fills back up. Yeah, so
with digital menu board integration with the point of sale, not only do you get the ability to pull prices and other items, caloric information, etc off from the point of sale and display that dynamically in the menu. But if they add six something in the POS, the item can be at six off the menu without having to do anything it's through the integration, we have a couple of different methods and simple method is to just overlay not available or a sold out over the price. And that that's that's a
simple method. The other method is to have everything on the menu be dynamic. So if something's 86 in the POS, everything on the menu just shrinks up, because all the text is dynamic on the menu, it can just reconfigure the order of the products and everything can just collapse and that item would just go away. That's a little bit more elegant than putting just a sold out over the price. There's a little bit more setup, but it's totally it's totally doable with menu board manager.
So last piece mark and you talked about this early on is the ability to manage these things from you know, early days or ship out USB, hey, take the old one out, plug it back in, get the remote go find the remote from somewhere and go go click on the little movie file that's on the USB. Me that's dealt with restaurants that many boards, digital menu boards early days, I had to deal with that at some point. It's not that way today.
So you guys have built a full CMS system that allows you the capability to change these things, have them be dynamic, have them be different. Talk us through just the value of that and how impactful that is to restaurant operators because the people that we've talked to that have seen what you guys have done are blown away and I'm not saying this to downplay just honestly they're just like oh my goodness, I didn't realize I
could have this much control. I don't need to have a web design you know degree and and such they can they can deal with the dynamic content, the pricing, how things display on their own through your guys's solution, so talk me through kind of what you guys built and and what customers are saying about it.
So menu board managers is suite of applications. It is a content management system where you would manage your files and folders and create signs and presentations and do all the normal things that any content management system would be expected to have have. But we also have other applications in the suite, we have the unit's Manager, which is a view of all of the units that are in your,
in your ecosystem. And with with a broad view, you can see which what your units are, what they're named, where they're at what presentation they're playing, how they're connected via Wi Fi, or wired. If they're currently online, serial number in case you need that, for some warranty service, you never have to go asking the manager to climb up on a ladder and get that serial number or anything like that. It's all captured in the database from day one when
the unit is provisioned. And so you have this bird's eye view of what's going on in your entire ecosystem. And then you can dive in to each unit, you can get logging data, you can get screenshots of exactly what's playing on that unit, you can update the firmware, you can update the software, you can tell it to show an alternate presentation in the case that you know, you need to do that.
You can reload you can reboot the unit, you can do all this remote management and you you don't have to roll a truck out there to service the unit which enables us to support our customers really at the highest level. Our support team is based here in Texas, we answer the
phone. And that's the tool that we use to help our customers and 99.9% of all issues can be resolved remotely using the unit's manager, we also have the reports Manager, you can you can create a report by just defining some criteria, build that report, save that report share that report X that export that report via CSV, schedule that report to run on a daily basis and will allow a lot of the IT
managers at the QSR. They want to pull a report for example, it says show me all the units that haven't connected in the last 24 hours, and email that to me every month. So in the morning, they have a very easy way to check the connectivity all their use of all their units, it gets this nice report in their email, they can see which units haven't been connecting. And they kind of know this location might be having a network issue, they can get ahead of these issues before
any any issues come up. Now with menu board manager, all the content is downloaded to local storage. So even if your internet goes out, you still have your signage up. The thing we say around here is never a blink sign. And but these tools and these reports and stuff, enable you to get ahead of issues, you know before you're proactive.
Well, one of the other things that I love that you guys did mark is the fact that you guys work on a lot of different devices. So it's it's not the one size fits all and you guys have built your product to be able to work in a lot of
different environments. And so for those that are like scared that they're gonna have to spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars to outfit a store and you know, or they're they're on it competitive solution, and they want to go to your guys's stuff, because they've just been blown away with all of the things that
you guys have done. Talk to me a little bit about kind of your guys's design and architecture that have helped you guys be able to work in a lot of different environments, LG, Samsung, different media players and such. Right, so
we started on bright sign and we still support right sign right sign has actually come a long way, you can actually install applications on the series three and above bright signs now. So we we now have a menu board Manager client that runs on a bright sign. And then, you know, we've been supporting the Samsung Smart Signage platform on the run Tizen for a long time. We also made a Web OS application for LG displays.
Some panel Panasonic displays some displays run Android, we support Android and Android TV. We also support Raspberry Pi. So many of our customers come to us and they want to go digital and they need a solution. And in that case, we would suggest buying a commercial display with a system on chip, which means no
media player. Some customers have existing screens and might be televisions and you know it's cost prohibitive to replace them so we can add a low cost media controller and then some of our customers come to us and they say listen, we have digital, but we're using USB or we're using a different CMS and we are not happy and it doesn't integrate with our point of sale. And we go and look at the restaurant and lo and behold they've got a compatible display. It really after a two minute installation
process. The menu board Manager client is running on the display the restaurants converted the menu board manager and they're super happy because they didn't actually have to do it anything except subscribe to our service.
Ya know, and I think those are pretty big points of difference. Jason, what's next? What's next? For what some what's next for the world of digital signage? You know, we've it feels like we've got, you know, so many screens in our life. And, and to your point earlier, I think they're they're helping make things better. They're making the world a better place driving the behavior that we want as, as restaurant tours and as brands. But what's next? Where are things going?
Well, a couple a couple of things. In the immediate future, I think that more restaurants are going to employ order ready boards, an order ready board is a digital sign. That is in the in the reception area, where on that display, you can show data coming from the PD, from the POS, even from the KDs, that shows when an order is going to be ready, the account down to time when the order will be ready for pickup. Some cases, the customers name and the
order. And so a delivery driver or a customer that walks in having made a mobile order, can look on that board and see if their order is ready or not. And it's ready, which bin it's in or what cubby it's in depending on the brand that will have these like cubbies with numbers on them. And it shows them where their order is because of labor shortages. This really helps restaurants eliminate the questions that come up from a delivery driver or the confusion of like where their food is, and
when it's going to be ready. So that that is something that I see in the immediate and then like everything else, artificial intelligence, machine learning is definitely coming into play. For digital menu boards. There are like license plate recognition technology that can help speed up ordering by recognizing a customer and suggesting things that they've
ordered before. There's also ways to display the right products on the menu based on artificial intelligence, we're really starting to brainstorm how that might help our customers and implement and implement that into menu board manager.
I love those two thoughts. And I'm gonna throw two more at you and just kind of ask for your opinion. I know years ago in the UK, Pizza Hut had started to play with some retinal tracking eye tracking on the digital menu boards. I don't know if you remember any of that stuff, but they do. But we'd love to love to hear your thoughts on that. And then the second one is, is we had a guest on the show, maybe six months ago, that is doing dynamic
pricing. And they're doing dynamic pricing, primarily on digital orders. No different than surge pricing for Uber or American Airlines or, you know, Hyatt Hotels is changing the price based on events that are you know, Austin City Limits is going on down there, I promise you the room rates not the same as it would be where the flights aren't the same as it would be if it was on a normal Tuesday. And so. So I guess you can pick either one or tell me you don't want to talk about either of
them. But I'd love your opinion on both the, you know, the stuff that they did at Yum, with, with the retinol, you know, kind of figuring out where people are looking from an AI perspective. And, and, and or the digital pricing.
Yeah, I did see that Intel had this retinal technology and also recognizing the the gender of customers in the store. And the big brands like yum can afford that kind of technology. I'm not sure how much the return on investment they got from that. But I am aware of that technology. Most of our customers don't don't have the budgets to spend. And I'm not sure exactly what the benefits are. I think it's interesting data. And I think, you know, big data is a hot
topic these days. Sure, they're trying to collect all kinds of demographic information. I'm not sure that how that helps a restaurant chain of 500 locations, though, maybe 1000s 1000s locations. They get enough data to help them sell more, but I'm not I'm not so sure about that one.
Perfect. And then what about dynamic pricing? I know the you know, people have been talking about do they change prices in her day? Do they do surge pricing? You know, do they reduce pricing when things are going? You know, you talked about the specials? And do you have customers that are doing that already? I guess is the question.
I have not seen that. But I think that machine learning is really coming along. And I think that it would be pretty straightforward to do surge pricing based on order volume at a restaurant and that that is certainly a good application for machine learning. Yeah,
there was one brand down in San Diego actually years ago that was doing reduced pricing on beer. or when the cake was getting low. So when it was getting towards the bottom of the cake, they wanted to tap the cake like on, you know, at five o'clock before seven o'clock hits, and now the cake is out. And now they got to spend 30 minutes waiting to go get the cake and re tap it. So I thought that was kind of
interesting. Down on the Gaslamp district, I'd run into a company that was playing with playing with some dynamic they were they had like a stock market looking thing that would change prices based on based on things like that. So I don't know. It's just always interesting. I always love to get get people that are in the spaces opinion on things like that work, how do people get in touch with you guys how to help people learn about what
OSM is doing? You know, I guess, tell me what engagement would look like and what can they expect once they engage with you and your team.
So you can find us at OSM solutions.com, that is our main company website. And then our software is called menu board manager. And that's at menu board manager.com. You can contact us through the website, you can call us, you can email us and we'll be more than happy
to help. If you want to just talk through ideas, if you have a concept if you'd like to do a pilot, if you're using a point of sale, and you need to figure out how you could integrate that we'll be more than happy to help and do a free consultation.
I love it. And as my marketing manager Mark Rosenberg said earlier, you know, thank you guys for showing up to the show. If you haven't already, subscribe to the newsletter or subscribe to the show on YouTube. Subscribe to the show on on your favorite podcast player, please do. So. If you guys have got guests that you guys want to have on the show, send them my way. Mark, thank you so much for sharing your insight on the world of digital menu boards and digital
signage in general. I do think it's going to be a world 10 years from now where we're not going to recognize paper money boards anymore. I think it'll all be digital and I'm excited for that day because I think companies like yourself are really paving the path to help people get there.
Thank you Jeremy. I really enjoyed talking to you today.
And to our listeners guys make it a great day.
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