 Welcome to Connecting Hawai'i Business on Think Tech Hawai'i. My name is Kathleen Lee, owner of Kathleen Lee Consulting, and I am your host for this program. Think Tech Hawai'i is a platform that encourages civic engagement through conversations that educate, enlighten, and inspire. And we are currently live streamed on ThinkTechHawaii.com as well as on, whoo, stutter there, as well as on ThinkTech Hawai'i's Facebook page. And viewers like you have the opportunity to ask us questions during the show by sending your questions to questions at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Now that I've gotten that intro out of the way, happy new year to everyone. We are now in 2021, and we have a special guest on the show today, special to me because this individual was the same one who got me on the show as an interviewee when I was first starting out my business a few years ago. And he's interviewed me as well. So I'm coming full circle on the first Connecting Hawai'i Business show of 2021. So please welcome John Stranberg. He is the Hawai'i General Manager for Pacific Digital Science. Sorry, I had to stutter on that one, John. I apologize, but welcome to the show. Well, thanks for inviting me again. It's been a while. Right. And the tables are turned. So now the squares are different. So now you're on the right side. And my biggest fear is running out of things to say. So you have to push me along. Yeah. When did that happen? Yeah. Whichever it could be. Well, could you let our viewers know about you? Short intro. Who is John Stranberg? Let's see. Father, neighbor, realtor. You know, that's somebody else's file. Actually, no, I am a father. I'm also a very good neighbor, very involved in the community. I've been the General Manager for Hawai'i Operations for Pacific Digital Science. Nineteen months now. So for us, it's been a journey, the pandemic really put a damper on things for us. But it's been good to allow us to learn from what we've been doing, fine tune some processes and hopefully come out stronger in 2021. Okay. And tell us about Pacific Digital Science. What do you folks do over there in your Waikiki office? So our name kind of says it all. We provide digital signage to a myriad of companies from transportation hubs to hotels, airports, bus stations, to digital menu boards. So if you walk up into a local jack-in-the-box, you'll look up and you'll see a digital board. That's some of our handy work. Our customers will have our, put up their menus to change up what they're offering for the day, show up in the specials, and that's what we do. That's just a portion of it. There's, I can go on and on. There's advertising boards, directional wayfinding boards, you name it, we'll probably do it digitally. So what you're saying is you're, you're somewhat, if not an expert when it comes to digital formats. Yeah, so when I say expert, it's, anyone can hang a TV screen and shove a USB stick into it and produce an image. But what we provide is, let's go a little bit deeper into that and what is your intent on that screen? That's where my company comes in and says, okay, this is what you want to do. This is how we would set it up for you. And these are the benefits because features are there. It's just how do you use those features to benefit for yourself? And I think we, we sort of covered this when we were going over the show and you've heard this a lot as well. So the business community and even like everyone in general has used the word pivot when it comes to accommodating everything that's been going on. Why do you think it's important for businesses to pivot in a way that going back to the title of the show maximizes digital formats for their businesses? So one of the biggest pivots in any industry, food, grocery deliveries and so on is people stop going into retail space. So you pull up with your car, you've pre-ordered and you just type in or text something, hey, I'm here. And then they say, okay, which stall number are you? Which color is the car? They bring out the packaging. So storefront now is like we're seeing more and more of this, not just in white, but our customers across the mainland have pivoted to a point where they're now putting digital signs in front of their store. So, hey, I pulled up in front of let's say a grocery store. There happens to be a sale on, you know, rump roast. They could put that on that board for the day. And then as the customer is waiting for their groceries, it's like, oh, actually, gosh, you get a rump roast on sale. Add that to my grocery cart for the next trip or have it deliver or whatever it is. So the parking lot essentially comes your new showroom by using a digital sign. You can actually change up when you need to. One concern that I have kind of identified when it comes to the business community is, you know, pivots, with pivots come costs and especially with digital formats, you know? I mean, we talk about, like, social media and the internet, but as well as, like, what you were talking about, the tangible, bigger things. Like, what about costs? You know, I mean, that's something for people to consider. But what do you have to say about that? So cost is doing business. There's two types of costs that we normally deal with. Typically when you put up a screen, if you're dealing with capital costs, it's the cost of the hardware, the installation, and so on. It's a one-time fee. And then there's the ongoing upkeep, which becomes operational costs. We're working with different ways of covering that, either working through special prices through our vendors or offering a leasing program, and in some cases, through our manufacturers, we've been able to offer up until recently 0% financing for three years on the screen and installation. So our partners have it out there. We just need to figure out how to make that work for each individual customer. So if you were financing $100,000 worth of video project, yeah, we'll find ways to make that work for you and fit into your budget. You also mentioned grants when it comes to, you know, assisting businesses, when it comes to digital science. Yes, so the COVID grants over the last year has come into play with quite a few of our customers. It covers if you're going to go out there and pivot and say, my business now requires a touchless menu system, which we can provide for you, you pay for that. And the grant actually reverses for it. We've done that a few times here. Grants have paid for digital thermometers that we've been providing. It's got a digital screen. It tells you your temperature. I can program those things to let you through a door. That's covered by the grant. So as long as you have the capital to pay for the front, then the grants will pay you back. But from a small business perspective, I've come across a lot of businesses that would love to have any of our products, but they just don't have the capital to front it to get the grants to come back. So it's a, for me, it's a double-edged sword. It's great that it's there, but no, I can't make use of it. So our smaller business customers are finding different avenues, and we're trying to work with them to find the best ways of spending their dollar to get the most and then future proofing for the future. I do like to focus on small businesses because I feel like, you know, these are the organizations or the companies that, you know, make a point, along with the big businesses, of course, but where do you recommend for them to start when it comes to pivoting, pivoting stutter, pivoting and implementing digital formats when it comes to their businesses? Well, for smaller companies and smaller businesses, it's mostly getting your collateral, your design aspects ready to go digital. We've come across a lot of customers saying, hey, I want a digital mini board, and they send me a picture of their mini board, and it's all handwritten in chalk or a dry erase board, but they don't have color pallets picked out. They don't have an actual logo. Sometimes we're creating logos from scratch with their input. And it's, I'm not saying we're great at it. We're okay at it. There's companies out there that specialize in logo design. And that's what they do. But we're more of, let's get the hardware in place, let's get the software in place, and let's add these features to provide the benefits to help you grow your business. But then there's companies out there, PR, ad agencies, of course, create logos that they need to step up and go, okay, this is the next step. We work with them and we find they don't know where to start. So they call me, and we go through the process, and you're like, I need to go where and where and where. It's just that much more difficult when you're not prepared. So we go through that process, teach them the steps. And if they're not ready for us, we're gonna be ready for them when happens. What are the some of the challenges that you've faced when it comes to presenting the idea of digital avenues to small businesses? It's always the I can do this from YouTube. It's, it's, it's, oh, it's only a TV screen. Can I get a Best Buy TV screen for $200, hanging on my wall in a work? Well, with commercial signage, it's a little bit different. If I can spend just a few minutes on describing what commercial screen does. A commercial screen is gonna usually be brighter than your TV at home. At least one and a half times or more, sometimes we're outdoor brightness 15 to 20 times brighter. It's got a built-in computer. It's called System on a Chip, which allows us to run our software, which most smart TVs now don't provide. And it's going to need internet connectivity. Again, not every new TV can do that. So that's just a very basic level. And from a warranty standpoint, a consumer TV, once you put it in a commercial environment, you've got a one-year warranty is now down to 90 days. Whereas a commercial screen comes with a three-year warranty from the manufacturer after that. So that's like the very basics of commercial versus consumer. And that's where the hard part is everyone thinks I can go to YouTube, hang a screen, throw the USB stick, and there's my menu. Question now is, hey, your menu changes every day. You're gonna make the graphical change every day. Have you thought about that? Have you gone that far? Oh, no. Your stores are open 24-7. Your screens are only designed to be on 10, 12 hours a day. You're going to be replacing screens every three, four months. Are you prepared for that? Or your mount, the way the screens are hung on the wall. It's consumer grade mounts, but you're a business. If someone were to knock his head, bang on the screen, will the mount hold it and prevent from falling? Now you got some OSHA rule requirements and other liabilities because you're using the wrong mouse. So there's a lot that goes into screen design and that's what we provide is that, you know, we've done it enough. We've been around for 16 years. I think we kind of know what we're doing now. You bring up really good points because I didn't even think of that, you know, when it comes to warranties or everything else that you mentioned. So I like that you have surfaced that for people to start thinking about digital signs and how it's just not just buying a TV and mounting it on the wall yourself. We've seen it. There's a lot of places I've walked into. Oh, that's a best buy. I don't doubt it. But we are going to go on break soon. When we come back, we are going to address a viewer question regarding how your services can help with our public schools. So stay tuned. Welcome back to Connecting Hawaii Business on ThinkTech Hawaii. Today on the show we have John Strandberg, Hawaii regional manager of Pacific Digital Science. Right before we left off, I had mentioned that we received a viewer question and I'll just pose it to John live. What can Hawaii's businesses do to improve and support public education? Or maybe we can whittle it down and go with, you know, how can like a company like Pacific Digital Science help? Let's simplify it that way. Let's go back to the main question. I was just thinking about that when you were asking the question. I kind of have a little bit inside on it. I used to serve on the board for junior achievement. And if you don't know what junior achievement is, it's a financial literacy program run at the schools teaching kids financial literacy all the way from kindergarten through high school. Everything from what is the dollar all the way to what's bank interest rates and so on up to building a company. So that's provided because that's not in the school curriculum anymore where it used to be. But how can small businesses help the community? I would start off small potentially sponsoring little things at the school, holding school supply drives. That's like the basic grassroots level. But to move further is providing more of an internship program or even kind of a job shadowing. Because a lot of us do some very interesting work in our lives. But everyone thinks of all the kids know is doctor, lawyer, police, fire. Every kid wanted to be one of the astronaut, you name it, football player. But a lot of us have really cool and interesting jobs that people just don't know about or especially kids. To this day, my job would not be 20 years ago my job was not heard of. Who would do this type of work? And in 20 years from now is we'll hear jobs that we don't even know about now. So as a small business, the best way is to offer job shadowing is to be involved in schools that you're providing your working community. And to try to get more involved. Invite, get teachers to do you know zoom meetings like this to talk about what we do. I used to do career days in my past when they're different companies. And kids were like that's what you really do? I said yeah that's my job. And they really get into it. It's like I didn't know that. Okay well on that note let's go over that then John. What are some of your favorite aspects, things about your current position and the way you're contributing to the community and businesses at Pacific Digital Science? Well for me it's mostly introducing Hawaii businesses to what's going on in the world. Pacific Digital Science is across the country. We're represented in New York, California and we do jobs across the country. We also have some work from Guam and other parts of the world. And we see what really goes on and how it works and we get to bring all that experience and what we see back to Hawaii. I was sharing with one of our clients recently that hey what we're doing for you here is actually just a starting point of what you really can do. And you're like really we thought this was cutting edge. I'm like oh no no no we could do so much more but underlying cost is really cost. For Hawaii it's the cost of the goods shipped in. We spent I'm just going to share this. We spent roughly 30% of the cost of that budget on shipping. Wow. Yeah so 30% of the budget to do this project was shipping. If we'd reduced it 30% down to 15 we could have done so much more. So what government and other things can do for a small business in Hawaii is figure how to reduce the cost of shipping. And I have my own thoughts on that which I won't go into because that could be a three-hour long dissertation. That's a different show. That's a different show. That's legislative processes but we can we can go over that at some point during the year. But I know when we were talking about your company and going back to the theme of the show which was maximizing digital formats. You had you outlined some ways that people can start. So what are immediate actions that people can take now when it comes to improving their businesses. Implementing things like digital science. I know you had mentioned capital costs or. Let's go take a step further backwards. I usually tell the owner and manager of whatever business. Take a walk in your customer shoes. Go back to your front entrance. What do you think a customer wants to see as they're walking in your door. Start walk through your shop as if it's you're the customer shopping and not as the owner or the business manager or an employee. If I was a customer what do I expect to see and then start thinking about that. For instance I walk into some shops I'm walking through. First thing I tend to notice is they have on their doors five different notices about COVID about this about that. Then they got on the left hand side they got a special going on 20% off of whatever inventory. Then over here they got you know aunt Susie's bake sale goods on the left counter because she wants to try to sell something. So I'm looking at just barrage of information. How can I best tailor that or cut that down to make it manageable and make it look professional. So the name of digital scientist professionalism is how do I make this look good without being cluttered. Where do you see this format going five years from now 10 years from now especially with in 2020 going into 2021 with the COVID-19 effects of people social distancing or just not. Well we're looking on the new technology front we are looking at different ways of utilizing touchscreen without touch. A few years back some of the android phones offered you know the touchless sensor where you flip pages by waving your hand over your phone. That's one of the things we're looking at. There's also facial recognition to open a door so you don't need to actually touch the door handle something's coming up. Voice recognition we've been working with a couple of clients on saying walking up to a kiosk instead of touching the screen like we're used to. It's like page forward page back find so-and-so if it's a directional screen and they'll tell you which floor they're on which elevator to take necessarily even a route on a map. So there's different technologies available for screens that are coming out and we're usually on the forefront of that. Thinking of I remember that I think when the pandemic was on the rise you were one of the first companies to introduce facial recognition devices. Can you tell us a bit more about that and what other offerings a company like Pacific Digital Signs has for businesses that may be looking to see how they can respond to everything that COVID-19 has affected? Well we were the first to set one up here in Hawaii for a commercial business and I'm going to give a shout out to group 70. They were the first or G70 knows or they were the first to deploy one in their lobby to allow employees and guests to check in as they go to work. So from the start of that it's got some added features where you can add entry for doorway. It'll tell you your temperature if you're wearing a mask or not. It'll identify you even with the mask. Kathleen Lee you're allowed to go in the store. As you step forward it recognizes you, takes your temperature and unlocks the door. So that's the starting phase of this product. Now we're able to get them programmed to send an email. Some of the above temperature. They're used as time clocks now so you can clock in the clock out using your face without touching anything. Oh that's cool. I haven't heard of that. How does that write to spatial recognition? Strictly facial recognition. Wow. If you think about it your iPhone offers it, your Android offers it. Now you have this device that offers it. So no more faking. You have to show up for work for change. Yeah. Not so much on not knowing people like that one. But yeah. So there's a lot of new features being added. Now we're doing badges. You can print like for hospitals. You walk in. It takes your temperature. For the day you've passed a test but tomorrow you might be sick. So you take it tomorrow. It's like oh yeah no. You're above temperature. You have to go. It sends an email report to HR which tells the manager this person tried to get in. They're sick and we sent them home. Okay well we have about five minutes left and I would love for you to go over some questions that people don't ask or forget to ask or don't know to ask when it comes to digital formats. Can you name some that they can think about? You know if they do decide to go that route. If they already aren't. When it comes to businesses. Yeah. So it goes right back to think about what you want your customers to see. If you look at your phone everyone holds their phone the same way. It's in what we call portrait orientation. So it's a long screen. Short this way but long this way. That's portrait. If that's the image you want to see you have to prepare your content for that format. For that format. If you're looking thinking okay I wanted to look like a TV screen. Now it's in a landscape orientation. You have to adjust all your digital formats to match that. It's kind of like social media. Facebook, Instagram offers a different size. Instagram's usually a square. Facebook can now do landscape 16 by 9 orientation. So you kind of look at what do you want to produce and start going from there. That's like the number one thing we have is a lot of our customers will send us a file. I want to play this movie. It's great but it's in landscape but their screens are important. How much of the movie did you really want to show? This or the whole screen? Or do we need to chop it up so it shows a lot smaller so you see the whole screen versus things like that helps decide the format and the factors. The different factors and so on. As far as the content is, what kind of screen is it? If you have a 4k screen, guess what? We can do lettering very tiny and still make it readable up close or from a distance. What size font? What colors? I hate to name off customers but some of our customers have actually given us designs where the colors are non... They blended so much it was difficult to read. But yet they tell us they've spent a ton of money with their PR ad agencies to do this but then when it comes to digital format they forgot about it. Yeah so print is very different from digital. That's also a good point. I think a good amount of people don't recognize that so I'm glad that you pointed that out. We are wrapping up. So if people want to learn more about digital formats for their business, how can they get a hold of you? They can visit our website which offers a lot of other options for them but they can go to pacificdigitalsigns.com and you'll see all the projects and jobs we're able to do for form. Click on the little link and they can send me an email directly or fill out another form and get an answer from any of our offices across the country. Thanks John and on that note thank you again for being on our first Connecting Hawaii Business Show for 2021. As a former host I forget how fast this half hour goes. It's super fast so thank you so much for hopping on and sharing your knowledge today. Again this has been Connecting Hawaii Business on Think Tech Hawaii. If you missed our show you can catch it on YouTube or Facebook or on ThinkTechHawaii.com. Thank you so much and we'll see you two weeks from now. Have a good day!