Digitopia

Digitopia, part of dgt group, delivers full-service digital signage across the Benelux. Before starting Ekinsol, our founder was their Head of Development, and led the project that put his code in BMW and MINI showrooms across Belgium and Luxembourg.

The challenge

Car showrooms were drowning in paper. Price lists, CO2 sheets and options catalogs were printed, outdated within weeks, and replaced by hand. BMW Group wanted its dealers to swap all of it for interactive displays that stay correct on their own, without extra administrative work for the dealer.

What we built

The Digital Price Stele: an interactive totem that stands next to each car and answers the questions a buyer actually has. It shows videos and images of the model, live stock at that dealership, the legally required dynamic CO2 information, the full engine and options catalog, and financing and pricing.

As Digitopia’s development lead, our founder built the entire backend behind it: the API layer, the CMS and the dealer dashboard. A dealer manages the fleet from one screen and pushes a configuration to any totem. BMW Belgium manages brochures, photos and videos centrally, and every car inherits them automatically. The customer takes the configuration home with a QR scan. The signage works for the dealer instead of the other way around.

Next to the BMW work, he led development of Digitopia’s core signage platform and content player, running on ChromeOS, Windows and the web, with the monitoring and smart-content features that keep thousands of screens correct. The same years produced the in-office digital kiosks for Belfius and the ESSENCE smart-city research programme with VRT, Nokia Bell Labs and imec.

Deep dive: the stack

A .NET-based API and CMS backend, a player targeting ChromeOS, Windows and web, and central content distribution with automatic synchronisation. Continuous-deployment pipelines let a small team operate a large fleet of screens with confidence.

Where it stands

The collaboration ran from 2017 to the end of 2019 full-time as Head of Development, then continued about a day a week in maintenance and advisory until 2022, alongside the Waterleau work. The patterns from those years still shape how we design signage and IoT products today: central content, self-updating fleets, and dashboards a non-technical operator can trust.