Outmind

The project that would eventually become Outmind was born in 2006 to address specific needs of twenty-first century advertising market: 

• Due to the saturation of advertising in public spaces (out-of-home, or OOH), communication has become less and less effective;
• Traditional methods for out-of-home audience measurement are based on surveys and estimates, have low accuracy and are costly.

The company founders identified business opportunities associated with these needs. Thus, in late 2006, they started developing a new, more sophisticated, Digital Signage platform (hardware and software) which could be installed in mobile locations (e.g. vehicles), able to communicate with external devices (e.g., presence sensors and GPS), supporting interaction with the audience (e.g., through mobile phones and gesture recognition), and including a device capable of releasing real elements (such as smoke, liquids and aromas) in sync with the screen video contents.

These technologies, which originated a wide range of products, solved problem # 1: how to get people's attention in a digital world characterized by an excess of visual and auditory stimuli.

In January 2008, Outmind Ltd was founded, and has, since then, maintained a steady flow of innovations.

In February 2011, through its subsidiary Outscor, Outmind established a R&D consortium with the Institute for Systems and Robotics of IST (Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal), a leading European researcher in the fields of robotics and computer-vision.

To address problem # 2 (how to determine consumer behavior and reactions to advertising), Outmind and IST have developed a cutting-edge technology that can measure in real time - and with unrivaled accuracy - how many people see a particular advertisement and which preferential routes are followed by consumers in shopping areas, such as supermarkets. The first products were released in late 2011 and new products are expected in 2012.