LAS VEGAS — KioskCom Self Service Expo opens its spring show today in Las Vegas with a twist: Digital signage gets a room of its own.
Joel Davis, president and CEO of JD Events, which owns and operates KioskCom, spoke about the change at the semi-annual Self-Service & Kiosk Association Advisory Board meeting.
"It comes from conversations with the board, where I heard a lot about convergence and overlap, and mainly about the similarity of audiences," he said.
About 80 percent of KioskCom attendees are also interested in digital signage, he said.
The area bespoke to display technology is branded the Digital Signage Show and has about 40 exhibitors. Other digital signage products appear in exhibits among kiosk and other self-service applications. Floor space set aside for those applications increased 15 percent over 2007.
The show continues to recruit attendees to comprise a wholly merchant/deployer mix. Since taking over the show in 2005, Davis has implemented tighter standards against vendors coming to the show to sell to exhibitors, or even compete with them.
"Our main focus is to deliver a quality audience to our exhibitors," Davis said. "Our mandate was to clean up the audience when we bought KioskCom."
This year, he said, anyone suspected of not being a merchant/deployer was denied a badge. For the 2007 spring show, 83 applicants did not receive one. This year, 487 were turned away.
"It's almost as though we put the onus on them to prove they aren't a vendor," Davis said. "It hurts us on the show floor, but is upping the quality of the audience."
When pre-registration closed last Friday, 2,200 attendees had been approved, and Davis expects another couple of hundred to register at the show.
Davis said that in addition to a fall show in New York (Oct. 15-16 this year) and one in London (Oct. 1-2), his team is working on building an edition in Asia, and hopes to have something set up no later than 2010.
