Digital signage and kiosk success goes hand-in-hand for NV3

The last few years have been a tough time for businesses across the board, and perhaps especially so for new start-ups.

Some emerging technology sectors, like the digital signage and kiosk industries, have done well despite the economic downturn, both posting positive numbers in a variety of growth metrics.

Still, a company reporting a 300 percent increase in revenue from 2008 to now – especially for a firm with feet planted firmly in both screenmedia sectors – should be a welcome sign for others in both the kiosk and digital signage spaces.

Baltimore-based NV3 technologies sent out a press release today to report that it has achieved a 300 percent increase in revenue since its founding as NV3 in 2008, and that it has expanded its customer base across multiple verticals across the country.

NV3 got its start making cell phone-charging kiosks that incorporated digital signage advertising to drive revenue from the charge-for-free kiosks. It has since expanded into offering a variety of customized digital signage and kiosk solutions, from freestanding wayfinding solutions to a digital signage network for auto dealership merchandising.

The company's flagship product, the cell phone-charging kiosk, had its origins well before the founding of NV3, as one of its partners, Scott Calhoun, developed the earliest form of the technology as a firm called Cellular Solutions. Calhoun got together with now-NV3 Managing Partner Ryan Doak in 2008 to form NV3 and to integrate the company's digital signage solution into its kiosk solution.

The firm also has received guidance and assistance over the last three years from a tech firm incubator, Baltimore's Emerging Technology Center.

But the real key to the company's growth and success?

"We were fortunate in the fact that we found a market that had a need," Doak said in a recent phone interview. "And I don't care what kind of economic times you're in, if you have something that everybody wants, that's a good thing."

According to Doak, what the company heard from people in the digital signage space led it to a solution that he expects to become ubiquitous as cell phones and smartphones become ever more prevalent in the United States. As digital signage itself becomes more omnipresent, how do advertisers or deployers keep their message from blending into white noise?

"With the evolution of digital signage today, the one thing that's very difficult to do is to keep that captive audience for a period of time," Doak said. "So we really look at the cell phone-charging kiosks ... as a real, integral part of that."