Ilya Alshine
Title: CEO & Founder, ImageSurge Inc.
Age: 45
Experience: 2 years
Ilya Alshine’s background is in technology marketing. And he’s putting it to good use, making a splash in real estate with a new startup that creates interactive touchscreen displays, allowing a single storefront window to display every single one of a brokerage’s listings – and capture a lead from any passerby.
Q: Tell me a little bit about your background. How did you get into this niche?
A: Well, ImageSurge is really a classic high-tech startup, and that fits right into my background. I was an EE for undergrad – electrical engineer. About 10 years after that, I got an MBA at Northwestern, and through my career really I’ve always been at the intersection of media and technology. I worked with a number of the major brands, Sony BMG, and I was a director of online marketing, and chief marketing officer for a mobile start-up, and I also acted as a creative director, which is probably my favorite role. So it was a bit of an accident – I was doing something that had to do with the projection of multimedia, and discovered all of this new technology.
Q: What inspired you to launch ImageSurge?
A: We see our company as part of the fifth screen. The first screen was the cinema, the second screen was television, the third was the PC. The next was the mobile device, and the fifth is basically everything around us – the Bladerunner scenario, the last frontier where everything around us can be digitized. The wall, the storefronts. Digital signage is an exploding industry. You look what the major companies are doing and we haven’t necessarily seen all of it yet, the US is sort of lagging behind Europe and Asia – but if you take a look at Intel and Microsoft, they have specific ventures poised for the digital signage space. It’s a fascinating industry. Our flagship product right now is an interactive storefront. We developed a technology that allows touch interactivity through any storefront window.
Q: Yes, I was wondering about that. How can you possibly make a touchscreen that works with an ordinary window?
A: Well, there are different types of technologies: there’s capacitance, there’s [infrared], there’s probably three or four [ways you can do it]. There was actually a product that was already on the market that inspired me to look for another solution – first of all to reduce costs, it was an expensive product. But second, I actually ran into a situation where it didn’t work basically. With modern, insulated, double-paned windows – you know, all these windows that people have now to be energy efficient – they have coatings on them to help keep in heat. And the coatings short-circuit the capacitance sensor. So it took [our company] about a year to come up with an alternative that allows us to operate through any type of a window. That was a major barrier. I would say 80 to 90 percent of our current clients have [energy-efficient] windows.
Q: What pushed you toward the real estate sector?
A: Basically, our customer is any type of business where people walk by and then walk in – it’s really wide open. We just happened to focus on the real estate sector. But it’s a really good fit. Traditionally, agents put up flyers on the window. It’s still a part of their marketing campaign. And there’s so many drawbacks to that – in this day and age, continually having to print paper flyers, there’s a lot of cost, you’re very limited in what you can include. And how do you separate one window from another? It’s a very competitive industry. Everybody’s selling the same product, essentially what’s in the MLS database. We’re having a lot of clients demand exclusivity. So what we’re offering really has so many benefits. I think you can’t really compare a flyer, to the kind of presentation of a property that you [can do with our signs] unlimited photos, information. You can basically replace the static storefront with an unlimited inventory of images.
Q: How receptive has the industry been?
A: It’s been amazing. For a start-up, we immediately started getting revenue. We had orders on release that people waited for six months. The minute we signed Halstead and Brown Harris Stevens, that catapulted us further. There’s a lot of talk in the real estate industry about technology, but if you go to any show, you see that we’re the only hardware vendor. The rest of it’s all online. [So we stand out.] And recently we’ve been picking up all the major brands: Hammond, Sotheby’s, Prudential, Christie’s. We recently were selected by Leading Real Estate Companies of the World as a preferred vendor, and we’re sponsoring an event in Italy with them.
Top 5 Advantages of Digital Signage:
- Infinite inventory
- Completely customizable
- After-hours lead capture
- Data collection
- Competitive advantage
