YCD Multimedia, Going, Going, Gone
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
YCD Multimedia, which has now publicly admitted that it is down to its last 10 employees, looks like it is definitely for sale. In its lifetime YCD Multimedia raised north of USD 30 Million.
According to a story in the local Israeli press earlier this week, several groups, including CTV, a digital signage company that is jointly owned by the Fishman group is competing with a rival owned by Lerner, who have previously bought-into YCD Israel for several million more.
Whilst we love a lot of the YCD technology – they were #12 in our Top 25 Digital Signage Software Vendors list for 2016 – we can’t fail to see how spending millions more on buying the company cannot be seen as anything other than throwing good money after bad.
A few weeks ago, it was reported that YCD Multimedia laid off all non-essential (not sure how that works) staff in New York, leaving only the CEO Sam Losar and two others.
#12 YCD Multimedia. YCD were pioneers in retail (and it’s not often you can say the word ‘pioneer’ in our industry with a straight face) and pushed the boundaries in how digital merchandising could be managed (and more importantly reported) with products like RAMP. With the acquisition of C-Nario in 2011 they also got hold of one of the early go-to companies in software video wall installations. Today C-Nario is rebranded not as a company but YCD’s flagship product, Cnario Digital Signage Suite. Their platform is an all-in-one combining content authoring, management and playback as a complete software suite – there are no additional modules to purchase. In recent years YCD has built a reputation for being the go to digital signage company for complex content playback and one of a kind installations. We’d happily recommend them for retail, large billboard and complicated video wall installations.
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