Barcelona | With a global team on site, Google demonstrated its commitment to the digital signage industry at ISE 2024. The focus at the booth this year was on new Chromeboxes. Invidis spoke to Filipe Ho, Global Strategic Partnerships Lead at Google, about plans for 2024.
In May 2022, Google officially launched Chrome OS as a new operating system for digital signage. It was Google’s second attempt to establish itself in the industry. Following the launch, Google’s primary focus lay on explaining to integrators and CMS providers what Chrome OS actually is and how the operating system differs from Android.
Next up on the agenda for Google was the expansion of its partner network. Because without CMS partners adapting their software to the operating system, market entry can be difficult. And the CMS partner network is also one of the three sales channels for Google Chrome OS, alongside the channel partner network and its own sales team.
One of Chrome OS’s first CMS partners was Signagelive. Google continues to seek collaboration with suitable platform providers. “With our CMS partners, we are looking for innovative and global providers who also have an advanced tech stack and the necessary service capacities,” explains Filipe Ho at ISE.
Launch of the new Acer Chromebox Mini
At ISE 2024, Google focused more on hardware – and presented new Chromeboxes together with partners such as Acer. “Our focus always comes from what the customers need at the moment. This year we have identified a need for the right hardware.” For the first time worldwide, Acer presented its new Chromebox Mini at the Google stand. With its super small format, it is primarily developed for digital signage kiosk applications. It is scheduled to make its market entry in the second quarter of this year.
The new Acer Chromebox can supply four displays with 4K content at the same time and runs on a fanless Intel Jasper Lake 6W CPU. This makes it even more powerful than the new Lenovo Chromebox Micro (invidis report), which was launched at DSE in December 2023 and was also presented at ISE.
By loading the video, you agree to YouTube’s privacy policy.
Learn more
Unsurprisingly, the topic of AI is on the roadmap for this year for the Google ChromeOS team. According to Filipe Ho, part of the AI strategy is the integration of vision analytics data.
Google’s commitment to the digital signage market is not only demonstrated at ISE. For the second time, Google will once again be a partner at the DSS Europe in May with Chrome OS. The conference in Munich is also a kind of homecoming for the software giant: With a large team of developers in the Bavarian capital, Chrome OS is at least partially “made in Germany”.
