Andrew Gould, Ditto (Squirrels)

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT A lot of technology companies have bolted digital signage capabilities on to their core software platform. Often, that means the end-products don't do a whole lot beyond playing out some files on a screen. I'm a bit guilty of making that assumption about Ditto, a wireless screen sharing platform that also works as a digital signage CMS. In chatting with the company that develops and markets Ditto, and now in this podcast with co-founder Andrew Gould, I've learned Ditto is much more than an add-on. Some customers get Ditto licenses for the signage functions, and then don't even use the screen mirroring. Based in Ohio, the company spent its first dozen or so years selling screen sharing into the education and workplace verticals. But it started getting a lot of requests from end-users about adding functionality that made screens useful during downtimes. They wanted to get more bang from their hardware buck. So the parent company, Squirrels, spun up the digital signage component in 2020, and Ditto is now a tandem offer. Gould concedes there are maybe some things a pure-play, enterprise-grade digital signage CMS can offer that Ditto can't, but there's an awfully big user base out there that's never going to need or use a lot of those more exotic and elaborate functions. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Andrew, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of the company? Is it Squirrels, the company, or is Ditto the company or is Ditto the product?  Andrew Gould: Ditto is the product. Squirrels is the company. We founded the company in 2008, and we've been mainly focused on wireless collaboration in classrooms, and huddle spaces in higher education and then, in 2020, we expanded our Ditto offering to include digital signage and emergency alerts, which is something a lot of our K-12 customers were requesting.  So when you started the company back in 2008, was digital signage on the roadmap way back then, or is it purely one of these situations where you had the K12 people asking you about it and eventually realized okay, we should do this? Andrew Gould: Yeah, it was a situation where we were focused on the collaboration, and then in the feedback channels we had with the customers, they started asking or suggesting, It'd be really great if we could show things when we really weren't showing things. When the teachers weren't mirroring their screens and sharing things, it'd be nice if we could say, here’s what today's homework is, or here's what's going on at the school or for higher ed, here's upcoming events, things like that.  So we saw it as a natural evolution of, “We're already on that screen. It makes sense to allow users to utilize that screen when it's not being used for the primary function of collaboration.”  That primary function, could you walk through how that would work in a typical scenario? Andrew Gould: Yeah, so we have an application that runs on a device connected to the screen or TV in the front of a room. Be it a projector, a flat screen, doesn't really matter. It runs on Apple TVs as well as Windows devices so there's some flexibility there of whatever device they wanna have connected to that main screen. There's just a piece of software called Ditto Receiver and that handles all of the functionality of showing what's being shared by students and teachers in the classroom. It handles displaying the digital signage and it also handles displaying critical emergency alerts, if they're fired and all of those things connect back to the cloud.  The IT staff manages that from a central cloud portal, and then it periodically checks for updated settings, digital signage, configurations, et cetera, pulls those down, and caches them locally, so if you do have a little blip in the network or the internet goes down temporarily that functionality can continue to run even if it's not connected to the internet for