Lessons Learned From A Decade of Embedding Wireless Screen Sharing Software

After over ten years pioneering embedded wireless presentation technology into OEM interactive displays, I want to share some of the key lessons we’ve learned at DisplayNote:

Frictionless First Impressions
We’ve found that eliminating the complexity for end users helps drives adoption and satisfaction. And believe me, we learned the hard way: we started off by putting stickers on hardware or in the box letting users know that the hardware came with some great DisplayNote software.

And while we were seeing users adopt the software and partners increased market share, we knew we had to work every day to go further and make connectivity as easy as saying hello. So, by upskilling on Android and embedded tech, and by handling connections, compatibility, and updates centrally in the embedded software, your participants can walk into a room and instantly start presenting, no expertise required.

Reliability Rules
Through extended testing and hardening, we’ve ensured consistent up times even with constant use. Features like automatic background software updating and failover let us achieve reliability rates over 99.999%, affording us great customer retention. And sure, like any technology provider, we’ve suffered the odd knock along the way, a server provider has a blip, or button doesn’t do what it was designed to do, but we learned that its how you respond is the true measure of a partner. We default to full transparency, we ensure our senior team are personally available when needed, we do not hide behind emails or wait 24 hours to respond when every second is essential.  We also found that standing on the shoulder of industry giants like Azure and AWS, gives our partners and their users peace of mind when it comes to data and product security.

Expertise Across Software Stacks
At the heart of everything we’ve done is a skilled engineering team with a core specialism in video transmission. To create exceptional embedded wireless experiences, broad software skills are crucial as is a specialism in video transmission. To deliver embedded software that powers some of the world’s greatest display brands takes a huge skill set, from Integration with hardware like WiFi chipsets, optimizing for low latency video encoding/decoding, building customized sender/receiver applications, background services and notifications and handling lifecycle events and connectivity changes gracefully to name just a few.

Flexibility Fuels Innovation
We learned that no two partners are the same. Every OEM partner has unique needs, unique structures, goals, hardware and vertical and regional focuses. So instead of a one size fits all, we designed our platform architecture to allow customization around specific use cases, modality needs, and future product goals. For example, over the years we’ve created customized wireless casting receivers and clients, SDKs for easy sign in to Google and office 365, custom home screens for app launchers, mobile apps that allow control of a projector and lots more. This agility accelerates our shared roadmaps.  In addition, we have learned to work with product teams and the different (sometimes competing ) regions to help them prioritise what’s important so that we can move forward together.

Global Reach Requires Scalability
Expanding our deployments to tens of thousands of meeting rooms and classrooms worldwide revealed important scale lessons. We’ve invested heavily in cloud infrastructure and management platforms to streamline large device roll outs, automate issues remediation, and simplify usage analytics to reduce TCO as deployments grow.

Fanatical Service Delights
Even with high reliability rates, providing multitiered technical support differentiates customer experiences. Our expert team handles escalations globally, even directly assisting end customers to simplify troubleshooting and deliver on our brand promise. We view ourselves as an extension of our partners’ support team.

Of course, at DisplayNote, we’re still very much on a journey of discovery and will no doubt encounter challenge and scenarios that will serve as learning opportunities and help us deliver even greater solutions to our partners over the next decade and beyond.

If you read this far, I welcome the chance to discuss applying these lessons learned to truly differentiate your next interactive display lineup. If you’re exploring how purpose-built embedded wireless sharing and conference software can help you capture market share, deploy at scale and inspire end user evangelism, I believe the opportunities for our continued partnership are immense.

Ed Morgan, COO.