I was contacted by Tristan Lewinsohn, a journalist who writes for Aka.tv, 
the definative Digital
Signage industry news web site. Tristan was doing a story on the Digital Signage market in Japan and needed a bit of background information on present market conditions and Digital Signage installations. He wanted some more information about what Vanten is working on but some of the more exciting stuff we are doing is not yet announced. I will be getting back in touch with him later to see if Aka.tv will do a story about Vanten and the projects we are working on.
Here is what I had to say in the article.
Chris Phelan, CEO of another Tokyo-based digital-signage service provider, Vanten, echoes Wesseling’s comments. “I cut my teeth in Japan’s IT market at the start of the Internet-access market in 1995 and see a lot of similarities with the emerging digital-signage market in Japan,” says Phelan.
“Typically, large Japanese companies are late adopters of technology and applications which radically change the way their businesses work. The larger the company, the longer they prefer to plan and research new deployments. They can afford to buy their way back into the market and catch up later,” he adds.
“We have been focused on selling to aggressive market participants that want to get out in front of their larger competitors. We have had success in the electronics retail space, restaurants, shopping malls and some sports-related businesses,” says Phelan.
“Once digital signage has reached a critical mass, there will be an explosion in interest from large retailers and advertising agencies. We are ready to talk to the large companies when they are ready – until then, we’re focused on first movers.”
